


Initiation

by Jaspergirl (old_fashioned_gal)



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Choices, Identity Issues, Magic, Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-17
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-15 21:49:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 50,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28820259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/old_fashioned_gal/pseuds/Jaspergirl
Summary: Season 4 with Willow and Xander working for the Initiative.
Relationships: Rupert Giles/Ethan Rayne, Tara Maclay/Willow Rosenberg
Comments: 14
Kudos: 11





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: No recognisable characters, settings or storylines are mine.

When the car pulls up beside her, Willow’s instinct is to run. After all, sketchy cars pulling up next to girls walking home from school is bad news even before you factor in demons, and it’s not like the Mayor doesn’t operate very much in the human world, the world of cars and guys in suits. But the guy in the suit who gets out of the car doesn’t attack, or even try to tempt her into the car. He just smiles politely and asks, “Ms Rosenberg? Do you remember me?”

“Yeah” says Willow because it suddenly clicks into place: Careers Day seems like a hundred years ago but it’s the same guy, the taller of the two guys in suits who spoke to her and Oz about exciting opportunities in the tech industry. Once you think about everything that’s happened since then, it might as well be a hundred years ago, but you don’t forget being headhunted at seventeen. And you don’t forget how you met your boyfriend either. Willow beams at the guy. “How’ve you been?”

He smiles a smile like he’s taking note of how unfazed she is. “I’ve been just fine. How are you?”

“Oh, I’m good. Applying to colleges and all that stuff.” She wishes she’d come up with a better word than stuff.

“We know.” He frowns. “UC Sunnydale? Can I ask why?”

“Well apparently you know the where even when I haven’t heard back from them yet, so maybe you do the explaining thing first?”

That smile again. “We’ve got a good working relationship with the college. They let us know if any of their students or potential students meet our criteria. I was surprised when your name came up. I assumed you’d go somewhere more elite.”

Willow isn’t sure what to say, so she says, “Right.”

He seems to wait for more of an explanation and she wonders if she should say something about family commitments which isn’t strictly untrue since Buffy’s family, or saving money which is definitely untrue since she’s already decided she’ll get a dorm room. But family commitments might make it sound like she won’t be able to take up whatever offer he’s about to make and she hasn’t decided, and if he can spy on the application process, he’ll know she’s applying for a room and anyway, “What is your criteria?”

“We’re pursuing a new opportunity with UC Sunnydale and another agency” he explains, “Since you’re going to be on campus, we thought we’d ask if you’ve ever reconsidered the offer we made you last year.”

“Oh, the apprenticeship? Thanks, but I’m decided on college.”

The smile becomes something a bit closer to genuine. “Well that won’t be a problem now: With our new partnership, we’re keen to recruit the brightest young minds to contribute to a project on campus.”

That catches her attention and he sees it. He finally gestures to the car. They’ve walked a little way past it but it’s still waiting. “Why don’t we discuss the details somewhere private?”

*****

The somewhere private is a conference room near the town hall. It’s done up impressively, but all Willow can think about is Faith and the Mayor. Last time she was in a public building like this, it wasn’t exactly willingly. Obviously, she can’t tell the guys from the tech company _Oh, by the way, the guy you rented this room is planning to ascend_ so she smiles politely and refuses the proffered caviar because her mouth has gone dry. She hopes no-one mentioned her name when they made the booking and is relieved when the general air of secrecy makes this seem unlikely.

“What about Oz?” she asks, “Daniel Osbourne. Shouldn’t he be here?”

A tight smile from the second suit, a new one. “We’re here to talk to you, Ms Rosenberg.”

“Oh.” Is it because Oz had to repeat a year, Willow wonders? But there were reasons. She wishes she could tell them the reasons. Knowing about the hellmouth and not being able to tell anyone was never much of a problem until recently. Recently she’s had her parents asking why on earth she’s staying in Sunnydale when she could go anywhere she chooses and is it that Bunny Summers? Recently she’s had to put off teachers who want to send her to the Ivy League because it would look good for the school and what is there in Sunnydale for a high flyer like her?

She comforts herself that Oz probably wouldn’t want to be a corporate automaton, as he put it last year. She isn’t sure she does either, but she listens while the first suit tells her, “From this summer, UC Sunnydale will be hosting an exciting research opportunity. Given the sensitive nature of this opportunity, I can’t tell you the specific focus of the research, but I can tell you that it will involve lab work and computer modelling, and that it is related to national security.”

“National security?” Willow repeats. Wow. She hadn’t expected that sort of thing to be going on in Sunnydale of all places. Sure, they have the military base, but it’s a small, sleepy town, hellmouth aside.

Unless this is hellmouth stuff. Could they know? She thinks of Marcie – Buffy told her what happened to her. She thinks of how Miss Calendar had a whole network of people – techy people, like these guys – who were already in the know. Innocently, she asks, “Why Sunnydale, for something like that?”

The second suit smiles blandly. “Sunnydale is…uniquely situated for this branch of research. You’ll know more if you agree to be a part of our team.”

“So I have to decide before I really know what it’s about?”

“We know it’s a big ask” says the first suit, “But due to the Disclosure of Classified Information section of Title 18 of the United States Code, we can’t be as frank with you as we’d like to be.”

“Oh” says Willow. She makes a mental note of Title 18 for future net surfing.

The second suit adds, “If you agreed to be a part of this opportunity, you’d be compensated. In addition to a wage, you’d receive full health coverage and benefits, your tuition would be paid in full and the cost of a postgrad course at the college of your choosing would also be covered.”

“That’s any college, anywhere in the world” the first suit adds, and Willow wonders if they know she got into Oxford.

Of course they do.

“Well” says Willow, “Well, money and no tuition fees is always good, but what if I agree and then I don’t like the work? I mean, all you’ve told me is computer modelling and lab work. You can’t tell me anything about the lab work?”

“I see you already know you’d like the computer work.” The second suit puts on a smile. They keep smiling, Willow realises, which means they keep letting the expression slip in between smiles. If they’d been smiling all the time, she wouldn’t keep noticing it.

“We can’t tell you more at this stage” says the first suit, “But, if you agreed to be a part of the research, you’d have a week of probation, after which you’d be debriefed and allowed to leave if you decided it wasn’t for you.”

“In which case” adds the second suit, “you would resume responsibility for paying for your education.”

“Right” says Willow because fair enough, if she left, they wouldn’t pay for her college fees. If she left, they’d debrief her and that would be the end of it. Only, what if it wasn’t? What if it was hellmouth stuff she had to tell Buffy about? Sure, they don’t look evil with their human faces and their suits, but neither does the Mayor.

It might not be hellmouth related at all, of course, but that line about Sunnydale being uniquely situated rang all sorts of bells she didn’t have before she met Buffy.

“What do you say?” asks the first suit.

What Willow doesn’t say, but thinks, is that a week isn’t long to decide. What she doesn’t say but thinks, is that _debriefed_ could include all kinds of threats and she doesn’t want to be on the wrong side of whatever Title 18 is.

What she says is, “Sure. I mean, yes. Yes, I am interested.” Because a week isn’t long enough to decide but it’s better than deciding no here and now, when there might be something going on that Buffy needs to know about. Or something which might be good for her, if it’s not evil, and maybe she’s only getting the bells, the evil vibes from the Mayor-like suits and Mayor-like bland smiles. Maybe UC Sunnydale will be different to all this.

*****

The first suit drives her home. Or, rather, he accompanies her home. The car is driven by someone else, someone hidden behind a tinted screen.

The first suit’s name is K. J. Hunter. He gave her his card as he handed her into the car.

“How long have you lived in Sunnydale?” he asks.

“All my life” replies Willow.

He smiles carefully. “So you know all its secrets?”

Willow meets his eye, equally careful. “Oh yes” she tells him, “All its secrets.”

*****

She isn’t supposed to tell anyone. She tells Buffy, Oz, Xander and Giles. She emails Giles asking if they can all come to his house, away from Wesley’s lurking presence (she doesn’t word it like that in the email, but Giles probably wouldn’t mind if she did) but she gets no reply despite the fact she did teach Giles how to check his emails last month. She tells Buffy to ask him, figuring she has the best chance of talking to him away from Wesley, watcher or not.

“What’s with the big secrecy?” Buffy asks, but she sorts it all the same, and soon they are seated awkwardly along Giles’ couch while he bustles in and out with tea. Willow hasn’t been here before. It’s nice. Very Giles, with the books and the records that Oz is already crouched in front of.

Once they each have a steaming mug in hand, Xander asks, “So, Will, what’s the occasion? Is this a kill Wesley planning session? Because that would be very wrong and, um, show of hands.” He raises his hand. Giles looks down to hide a smirk but Willow catches it. Buffy tells Xander, “Oh, seconded so hard” and then asks Willow, “Is it a college thing? You are still going to UC Sunnydale, right?”

“Of course” says Willow.

“Good. So what is it?”

Willow takes a breath. Somehow, she has ended up in the middle of three of them, Buffy one side, Xander the other. They balance their tea on the arms of the couch, but she cradles hers in her lap, the fog of it warming her face. Giles sits across from them and Oz stands to one side. He asks, “Willow?”

“Yeah” she says. When she pictured this, she was the one sitting apart, so that they could all look at her. It should be easier this way with her unable to meet all the eyes that are on her, but she’s aware of Buffy and Xander twisting awkwardly to see her. “It’s probably nothing” she says, “I mean, I don’t know if it’s a scooby level thing, but I thought you guys should know.”

Telling them is easy after that. Now that they know she isn’t sure what to make of the whole thing, she is able to get all the weirdness of it out in the open. When she finishes, Buffy asks, “So you think it’s a demon thing?”

“Maybe” says Willow, “But I might be kind of conditioned to read demon into normal.”

“The uniqueness of Sunnydale” muses Giles. “I can’t think what else they could have been referring to.”

“Maybe our happening night life” says Oz.

“It’s your night life I’m thinking of” says Giles.

“Research into demons” says Buffy thoughtfully, “That might not suck if they help kill them.”

“Well what else would they do?” asks Xander, and Willow thinks: _There. There’s the question._ She looks at Oz and finds him frowning thoughtfully.

“True” says Buffy, “And I gotta say, it’s about time. Here’s me doing everything by myself all these years.”

“The Council have been conducting experiments on demons for years” Giles tells her.

“Yeah, but since when do those guys share their intel?”

“About as much as the FBI do.”

“Well it’ll be different this time, right?” Buffy indicates Willow. “We’ve got a gal on the inside.”

“That’s if the inside is what we think it is” Willow reminds her, “It could still not be demony. But obviously I’ll tell you about it if it is.” She doesn’t remind Buffy that this will mean breaking national security laws. It’s not like Buffy needs reminding about how to keep a secret. But she does ask Giles, “Do you think the watchers will know about these guys if they are demon research guys?”

“It’s possible” he replies.

“If you ever talk to them, don’t tell them I’m breaking Title 18, okay?”

“I don’t talk to them, Willow. But, yes, I think we all agree that none of this leaves this room.”

“Gotcha” says Xander, “No shopping Willow to the security services.”

“Thanks” says Willow.

“Hey, and if you’re ever on the lam? My place.”

“Absolutely” says Willow, who thinks Giles would be a safer bet if she ever became a wanted criminal. Not that she’s planning to.

Xander adds, “That’s assuming we’re not all Mayor food by then.”

“Gee, thanks” says Buffy.

“Well, no pressure, Buffster, but I would like to actually do all the plans that I don’t have.”

“Noted” says Buffy, “One defeated Mayor coming up.”

*****

“Will you tell them about your magic?” asks Oz when he drives her home.

“No” she says, even though she hadn’t thought much about it. It turns out that hiding it from them is a reflex.

Oz says nothing for a moment, and then he says, “Good.”

*****

Buffy does defeat the Mayor, because of course she does, she’s Buffy. Willow wasn’t ever really in any doubt about that part, not deep down, but she is fuzzy enough on the details to panic as the ascension nears, and Oz helps her out of it by, well, taking things to the next level of intimacy is how she describes it to Buffy later.

Buffy’s all excited for her, of course, just like Willow was excited for things between her and Angel before it all went wrong. And it is exciting, and Willow does feel all that love and connectivity with Oz that she’s been taught by everyone who talks about these things to expect, but a part of her wonders, is that it? Sure, it’s tender, it’s connection-making and it makes her feel all warm and loved, but isn’t it supposed to feel like fireworks? She was promised fireworks. And she certainly wasn’t warned that when they do it a second time, Buffy will pop into her head. It weirds her out.

Not that she says any of that to Buffy, of course. Because, even aside from the weird, there is an explanation deep inside Willow, unexamined, and she doesn’t want to drag it into the light.

Maybe that’s why she doesn’t bring magic into it either. She’s just started reading about spells that require sexual energy and it would make sense to ask Oz to help her practice what with the two of them, well, creating sexual energy fairly often after those two firsts, the first time and the first time without an apocalypse. But she doesn’t ask. For one thing, Oz is very careful around magic, in a way that might hold things back a bit, but also, she isn’t sure it would work with Buffy popping into her head and the whole thing being not what she’d imagined and her trying not to think about that. Either the magic wouldn’t work or it would show her something she isn’t sure she wants to see. So she creates the energy for these new spells alone and tries not to think about why.

She does think again about whether she should tell K.J. Hunter or the guys at the college about the magic. Not the sex magic, that is, the magic in general. Except not “the” magic. _Her_ magic. She still comes up with no. It still feels like a reflex, an instinct, but she isn’t sure why. Except that her magic is private – so private, she doesn’t even share all of it with Oz. And not just private. Central. Maybe she will tell more people about it one day, but she’s not going to plan to. You don’t plan to make a connection with someone on that level.

Other than that nagging question, life is good. She does her reading for college and her reading for magic. Giles lets her borrow a few of the books he moved out the high school library before they blew it up, and she finds a way of borrowing more he wouldn’t lend her – Literally, borrowing that is; she’ll give them back when he’s not looking.

Whenever she isn’t reading, she and Oz spend the first week of summer in and out of each other’s beds or driving to the beach to watch the ocean. He plays his guitar and she floats shells, sets them down again in little patterns. Sometimes Buffy and Xander join them. Buffy mopes a bit, because of Angel, but Willow doesn’t begrudge her that. The week after an apocalypse, Buffy could do pretty much anything and Willow would still love her. Deep down, she was never in any doubt that Buffy would save them, but whether the saving would cost her life, that bit wasn’t clear. Never is. 

Maybe whatever’s going on at UC Sunnydale will help. Buffy could use some help.

It’s the end of the first week when Xander tells them his new post school plan, just long enough that the ascension seems like just another thing they’ve survived. They’re all on the beach. It’s late, not quite sunset, but toying with the idea of sunset, the sky turning pink at the edges.

“The army?” repeats Oz. “That’s a lot.”

“A lot of lot” says Xander, “I start my basic training next week and wow does that look like a crash course in hard. But I’ve got to do something while you guys go off to live the big college lifestyle without me.”

“Wasn’t that where the road trip came in?” asks Buffy.

Xander offers a self-deprecating grin. “Yeah, it turns out those things cost money.”

The army could cost a lot more than money, of course, but Willow doesn’t say that. Doesn’t want to put Xander off doing something that could be good for him and that he seems to want to do. She wishes what he wants to do could involve less danger, but she can hardly judge: She chose to stay in Sunnydale.

It won’t be the first time someone she loves has been in danger. She’ll deal.

“I guess the Halloween hangover will help” says Buffy.

“That’s what I’m banking on” says Xander, “It’s faded now, but I still remember a bit, and I figure the rest will come back once I get into it.”

Buffy pulls a face. “Probably the one useful thing Ethan Rayne’s ever done.”

Xander says, “Well, and give you all that knowledge of old timey dancing.” He leans back against the sand. “So what do you guys think?”

“I think good luck” says Oz. “Not that you’ll need it. Even without the army knowhow, there’s all the monsters you’ve helped kill.”

“And all the strategising for the ascension” adds Willow, “You’ll do great, Xander.” This could, she realises, be really good for him. It’s not as though he’s overloaded with options and a supportive family, and he does have the soldiery chaos magic still hanging on around him like hint of mist.

As if to counter those pros, Buffy says, “If they send you somewhere and you don’t come back, I’ll come and find you.”

“Thanks, Buff.”

“And then I’ll kill you for freaking me out like that.”


	2. Summer

She is invited to an orientation, a week before everyone else shows up at college. First, she’s shown into an office where three guys in suits ask her questions. They’re all older guys but not so old they could ever be called harmless. Just old enough, Willow thinks, not to hesitate. One of them sits across from her on the other side of a desk, and another off to the side. He sits with his legs crossed and doesn’t look at her, but listens carefully. The third leans on the desk an arm span away. None of them say who they’re working for or how they already know a lot of the answers to the questions they ask.

The questions they ask are about everything. She tells them the highlights. Yes, she was born here in Sunnydale, her parents are academics, they travel a lot but she’s been left at home to focus on her studies ever since she was old enough. Yes, she was at the Sunnydale High Graduation.

“What can you tell us about that?” asks one of the suits.

“There was an attack” says Willow carefully.

“Did you see what by?” is the next question and Willow notes the what where a who could be.

“Yes” she says, “I saw it.”

The men exchange glances and the guy at the desk scribbles a note on a note pad, even though they have a Dictaphone on, just at his elbow.

The man in the chair to the side says, “Local media reported some of the students fought back.” He looks at her for the first time. “Were you one of them?”

“No” says Willow, surprising herself with the lie. “No, I just got myself to safety.” She could add that she did some fighting first, make it seem like the lie was just modesty, but she decides not to: She doesn’t want them to think she’s combat gal and get her to do anything physical. Her life is dangerous enough.

Another note is made. “And what about outside of school?” asks the man at the desk, “Who do you spend your time with?”

“With friends” says Willow.

“Any names you can give us? For character references, you know.”

“My best friend was Jesse McNally” says Willow to avoid naming anyone they could access. Then she feels guilty for bringing Jesse into this. Not that Jesse would mind, of course. Jesse would find all this really cool, though Willow could assure him it is not. Already she is growing away from him, she realises, while he is left behind.

“According to your math teacher” says the guy leaning on the desk, “you tutor a few students. Alexander Harris and Percy West.”

“Um. Yes.”

“Are you still in touch with them?”

Another direct lie is more than Willow can manage with them all staring at her, and she judges it safe to say, “With Xander. Alexander.” She wishes she hadn’t used the diminutive. It betrays a closeness she could otherwise have hidden. Just in case.

“What’s he up to now?” The man at the desk smiles. It makes him look less scary and more like someone’s dad. “Is he going to college?”

“No.” It sounds rude and uncooperative to leave it at that, and it’s not like Xander has done anything wrong, so Willow adds, “He’s joined the army. He’s doing his basic training in Georgia.”

“You must miss him” says the guy at the desk, and Willow replies, “God, yes” before she can help herself.

The guy leaning on the desk smiles. His smile is less dad smile and more this-is-how-they-taught-me-to-smile-at-civilians smile, but when he says, “I’ve got three kids in the military. I know how you feel.” Willow doesn’t mind how close he’s standing so much.

The rest of the questions are about her interests and about where she likes to go in Sunnydale. Willow tells them the interests she thinks are relevant, like reading and computing, and leaves out the ones that are less so, like Cibo Matto and Doogie Howser fan fic. She tells them that she goes to the Bronze. The man at the desk looks up. “Regularly?”

“Every few weeks at least.” Willow realises that they’ve somehow neglected the Bronze over summer, in favour of the beach.

The man to the side says, “A lot of people who disappear in this town were last seen there.”

“Yes.” Willow frowns. Wonders if it might be best to make a joke of it, a _nothing to do with me_ sort of comment. Xander’s influence.

“Do you know why?”

“Um” Willow looks from one to another of them. She could just say _, because vampires, hellmouth_. But if she’s not reading this right, that’s the sort of comment that will lose her her scholarship. “No” she says, “I’d like to. I mean, obviously I’d like to.” She wavers on the point of saying she’d like to solve the mystery because she had, back before she met Buffy and all she’d known was that Sunnydale had a high number of disappearances. But that hadn’t been wanting to solve the mystery just for the sake of knowing, or not entirely because that would be wrong, because the important thing was, “To help.”

A note is made. The guy at the desk says, “What about your computing? Tell me more about that.”

Willow tells him how she got interested in computing, how long she’s been doing it and what she can do. She doesn’t tell him about Miss Calendar. Jesse is one thing, Jesse would look up to guys like these, but Miss Calendar would make them cower with a perfectly chosen, razor-sharp remark. Or at least, Willow likes to think she would.

It’s easy not to tell them about magic. She still isn’t sure they’re in the know, and that makes it easy not to tell, and easy to not to think about why else she might not tell, if that reason weren’t there.

The rest of the questions are thought experiment, personality screening type questions. What are her strengths and weaknesses? What helps her learn best? What would she do if a friend lied to the police?

They ask her what she thinks about the supernatural. Willow answers, “Well, I, um, I have an open mind. But really, I think anything in this world is natural, it’s just that some of it is less known about at the moment.” They seem to like this. More notes are made.

The next question is harder. What does she think about secrets? Willow thinks of Title 18 and catches herself blushing. Makes herself think of Buffy, the source of her most important and best kept confidences. “Sometimes they’re important” she says, “Sometimes, for the greater good, they need to be kept.” She was thinking of Buffy, but she seems to be channelling Giles. She adds, “There are some things people would rather not know.” More notes.

What they would have done if she’d come out as totally anti-secret, Willow isn’t sure. Perhaps just thanked her for her time and shown her the door (best case scenario, a voice deep within her mind warns) but what they do next is tell her how absolutely top secret and classified what she’s about to see today is and how there will be consequences if she tells anyone. Even her parents, they add, and Willow congratulates herself on keeping their knowledge of her friends to a minimum.

They don’t tell her what the consequences might be.

She signs various legal documents promising not to reveal what she’s about to see. Willow wonders if not having signed anything until now might protect her if they ever find out what she’s already told her four most important people but decides no, it wouldn’t, because she won’t be able to prove she told them before signing and not after, and because she plans to tell them more if it’s supernatural related, and because no, of course it wouldn’t, regardless.

They take her finger prints, scan her eyes and record her voice saying her name.

Then they take her outside to a waiting car, and drive a little way off campus and into the woods. The driver is hidden behind a screen again. That seems to be a theme. The driver is probably a guy. That makes four guys and one Willow, not that that means much. Three guys and a woman and a Willow could also be bad. Willow reminds herself that she answered all their questions.

She is reassured when one of them, the one who was leaning on the desk, says, “Once your retina scans are added to the system, you’ll be shown a quicker way in.”

They arrive at a door set into a sort of mound, a little swell in the ground. It looks like a bunker. One of the men, the one who was sitting at the desk says, “We should warn you, what you see today will be shocking for you. It may even alter your entire world view.” He doesn’t say whether she could still say no.

“That’s okay” Willow tells him, “My world view’s pretty unshakable.”

“Do you believe in God?”

“Um. Yeah.”

“Good. You hold on to that.”

Only one of them gets out the car with her, the one who was sitting off to the side. He pushes aside some branches to reveal a scanner which reads a card he produces from his pocket. There is a beep and the door opens inwards. The man leads Willow down a flight of stairs. The stairs are metal and the walls around them are white washed. It all looks pretty basic, a step up from a cave, so it’s jarring when she’s shown into a well-lit waiting area with sleek modern furnishings. There’s already someone there, a guy. Willow’s escort says, “You’re not the only Sunnydale High student to make our criteria. Ms Rosenberg, meet Chris Epps.”

“We’ve met” says Willow.

The suit looks a little put out. Chis says, “Small town, I guess.”

“Make yourself comfortable while we interview our final recruit” the man says, “Restroom’s across the hall, but I must ask you not to stray elsewhere in the facility.” He leaves the way they came.

Chris stood up when they came in. He sits down again and says, “Well.”

“Yeah” says Willow. She needs to stop saying that, she thinks. It sounds sloppy, unprofessional. Now she’s starting college she should say yes. She sits down in one of the stylish chairs, not too close to Chris. Asks him, “How are you?”

“I’m okay” he says, in the tone of one for whom this is a novelty. Willow supposes that once you’ve resurrected your dead brother, hidden him in the basement for years, dabbled in grave robbing and then lost your secret sibling all over again, okay must be a relative concept. She says, “That’s good.”

They are quiet for a moment. Then Chris says, “I’m surprised to see you here. I thought you’d go off to Harvard or someplace.”  
“Me too. I mean, I was planning for a while and also I could say the same about you.”

Chris shakes his head. “My mom needs me around.”

“Oh.” Willow glances around. No windows, obviously. There is AC, she realises, so quiet she has to feel it out by noticing the chill that apparently comes with pairing AC and an underground facility. She says, “I knew it was secret but the underground thing seems a bit much.” Then she worries because she wasn’t told she could talk about the secret with Chris. But he’s here too, isn’t he?

Chris smiles. “Yeah, it all seems pretty high stakes. Hey, just so you know, I’ve been waiting a while. They’ll probably take their time with the next recruit too.”

Willow wishes she’d brought a book. She asks, “When did they talk to you?”

“Near the end of last semester.” Chris lets a stretch of silence pass. Then he asks, “So you and Buffy still hang out?”

“Yea – um, yes. And Xander.”

“What are they doing?”

“Buffy’s going to UC Sunnydale too. Xander’s in basic training for the military.” She feels that mix of pain and pride she always feels when she says that out loud outside of interrogation situations.

“Wow.”

“I know. So, um, are you still in touch with Eric?” Willow is relieved when Chris pulls a face and replies, “Not really.”

More silence goes by. Willow glances around the room and notes the camera. There are three doors: The one she entered through, the one the suit had indicated leads to a restroom and a third with a built-in access control reader. There is a map too, showing fire exits. She stands up to examine it. Watching her, Chris comments, “It looks pretty big.”

“Even if this is all of it” Willow muses. The way to know for sure would be to find some blueprints. But the computers here probably have better protections than anything she’s come up against before.

It occurs to her that she hasn’t signed in or been seen by anyone other than the suits who drove her here. If something were to happen, no-one would know.

Well, except Oz, Buffy and Giles, who at least know she had her orientation today. But even they don’t know about the door in the woods, and no-one here knows that they know. As far as anyone here knows, no-one knows she’s here and she isn’t here officially, on paper.

A door in the woods. Like in the Magician’s Nephew. _The woods between the worlds_.

Chris asks, “Do you know much about what they do here?”

“I was just told computer modelling and lab work.”

Chris nods. “Same. I think they want me for the lab stuff. Seems like the pay’s pretty good, if I stay on after graduating.”

No offer of a post-grad anywhere on the planet for Chris, Willow notes. Or at least not one he can accept. She sits down a little closer to him than before.

They wait. After a while, Willow goes to the restroom just for something to do and a chance to look around. The hall is white walled and featureless apart from a sign for something called Loading Area B. Loading what?

The restroom itself is markedly less glamourous than the waiting room, with a lidless metal toilet and too-small sink. But it still has a newly installed feel to it, and Willow wonders how recently this whole subterranean network was constructed. Probably recently, given that the guys from the tech firm talked about a new project. Apparently one with a lot of money behind it, because big underground buildings aren’t cheap.

The military have money, of course, and so do tech corporations. Willow wonders which of the two is doing the bulk of the research here.

When she returns to the waiting area, Chris smiles and says “Still no sign of anyone. This is like waiting for an exam to end when you’ve finished all the questions.”

“Oh, I don’t wait when that happens” Willow tells him, “I go over all my answers even if I know I got them right.”

“And get tempted to change some.” Chris nods.

“And second guess myself a gazillion times.”

They reminisce about Sunnydale High for a bit, and then they get on to graduation.

“I just ran” said Willow, to ensure she’s told the same lie to Chris and their new…mentors? Employers?

“Same” says Chris, “But I know some kids stayed and fought whatever it was off. Buffy and few people.” He gives her a look like he knows she was one of them.

“What do you think it was?” asks Willow, partly to see how much he knows, partly to change the topic, or at least focus on a different part of the topic.

Chris frowns. “I really don’t know” he says, “I did get a look at it, but I think…” He looks down quickly “I think I was in shock. Saw something that wasn’t really there, you know.” He sighs, adds, “Thank god my mom wasn’t there. She’s not in shape for running these days.”

When the final recruit arrives, he’s a guy too, someone called Warren Mears. The three of them are left alone together long enough to establish that he hadn’t been planning to apply to UC Sunnydale originally, but he was persuaded by the offer of the scholarship, the postgrad. Robotics is his thing, science Chris’s and – so far as anyone here knows – computing is Willow’s. The three combined starts to hint at what happens here in a formless sort of way.

They wait, which is annoying because they’re all here now. Warren talks about all the other colleges he got into which is annoying too, because they’ve all been chosen for having good grades, but you don’t see her and Chris bragging about it. She doesn’t want to talk colleges when Chris had no choice but after a while, partly to shut Warren up and partly to show him that she’s just as capable as he is, Willow says, “I got into Oxford.”

Chris smiles, and Willow realises he was waiting for someone other than Warren to speak too.

“Not really my thing” says Warren, “A guy can have too much tea and British babes, you know?” He directs the last part to Chris, but Chris checks his watch to escape meeting his eye and being absorbed into the gross man bubble. Willow had had a flicker of annoyance on Giles’ behalf about the tea thing, in a we-can-make-fun-of-Giles but you can’t sort of way, but of course that was swept aside by the babes comment. She asks, “How many British babes have you met?” in a tone just doubtful enough that Warren gives her a poisonous look.

At that moment, a woman in a lab coat comes in via the access controlled door, and Willow is relieved to see someone in this place who’s less testosterone fuelled than the suits and Warren and maybe Chris. Someone more Willow shaped.

The woman’s name is Professor Patel. She goes through all sorts of safety and security protocol with them before they are even handed their visitor tags and shown through the access controlled door to a hallway. This hall is more brightly lit than the one leading to Loading Area B. It leads to a row of three lifts and they enter the third. Professor Patel tells them, “Some of what I show you today will surprise you, and some might frighten you, but what you need to bear in mind is that everything we do here is for the greater good.” Willow wonders what she’d look like in tweed.

When the lift stops, it’s impossible to tell if they are closer or further from the surface. From how long she and the suit were descending those stairs, Willow estimates that they could have fitted one floor above the floor with the waiting room. They are shown an armoury and told that the research they do here is closely related to national security, which they already knew, but it’s one thing to know it and another to know it while standing next to lots of big guns. Warren asks, “So what is it, weapons development?”

Professor Patel smiles and says, “All in good time.” When she turns away, Warren drops his own smile.

There are a lot of soldiers around the place, walking purposefully in groups and doing what Willow assumes must be checks of some sort on the guns. It’s all very loud and lacking any clear purpose despite the purposeful atmosphere. Professor Patel calls over two of the soldiers and introduces them as Agent Finn and Agent Gates. They seem nice, and actually speaking to guys in uniform makes Willow think of Xander. Agent Finn tells her, “I’m a TA at the college, so I might see you guys up top.”

“Wow” says Willow, “Soldiering and TAing? That’s going to take some work.” Then she feels stupid because obviously no-one signs up to secret military operations thinking it won’t take some work.

Agent Finn just smiles and says, “We’re here to be the best we can be.” Agent Gates rolls his eyes.

“Sounds good” says Willow, ignoring the eye roll. She always was of the opinion that life’s too short to worry about seeming cool, even before she found out that monsters are real.

As they move off, Agent Finn says, “Hey, see you around.”

Professor Patel shows them the communications base, which is overloaded with computers Willow would seriously consider swapping body parts for, a storage area which contains a dazzling range of lab equipment, and a canteen which looks like any canteen anywhere. Then there is a sleeping area “For when we do shift work”, a medical bay and the sealed door of a restricted area. Willow tries to map it all out in her head, but she’s getting disorientated. Probably comes with being underground, and with seeing better tech than she’s ever seen in her life.

Next, they are shown around a laboratory where a white-clad team are analysing tissue samples. Professor Patel doesn’t say what the samples are from. What she does say is, “This is our biology lab, but we also have a robotics lab, a chem lab and an anatomy lab as well as an initial assessment area we call the pit.”

“What do you assess?” asks Willow.

“Live specimens” Professor Patel replies. She watches carefully to see how they’ll react. Willow’s pulse picks up a little, maybe because the tension of waiting to see if this is something supernatural or not is buzzing inside her and what else could live specimens be except demons?

Actually, that’s a good question. She glances at Chris. He’s gone a shade or two paler.

Warren asks, “Animals?” in a tone like he wouldn’t mind. Willow supposes she shouldn’t mind either. She’s read about medical history; she knows there wouldn’t be a world of treatments without animal experimentation. But that was history: She likes to think there are better ways now, and when there isn’t, she doesn’t like to think about it. Warren though, he doesn’t seem to mind the idea at all. Almost the opposite, and Willow doesn’t want to think about what the opposite is.

“Something like that” says Professor Patel. She steps past them. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

They get into another lift, and this time Willow is sure they descend another level or two. The level they get out of is busier than any they’ve seen so far. It’s less science and more military, with concrete floors and harsh lighting drawing the eye to a fence around…

“This is the pit” Professor Patel tells them. They approach it slowly, so that the scale of it isn’t immediately clear.

It’s huge and gleams metallically, the shiny surface making Willow think there must be a lot to clean up after each use. Below them are a series of tables, stretchers really, each containing a different species of demon. Around each demon, scientists are clustered. Soldiers, meanwhile, stand at the perimeters with their guns, or talk to the scientists. As Willow watches, one of them points at a horn and gestures, a stabbing motion. She breathes, “Wow”.

“What are those things?” asks Chris.

“Animals of a sort” says Professor Patel, “Though not a sort you’d find in a zoo. We call them Hostile Sub-Terrestrials.”

“Demons” murmurs Willow. When Professor Patel looks questioningly at her, she adds, “Um. They look like demons.” Thinking about it, she realises she prefers _Hostile Sub-Terrestrials_. There are religious connotations to the word _demons_ that don’t really make sense. Nothing Buffy slays is a fallen angel.

“They do” Professor Patel is agreeing, “But I can assure you, there’s nothing supernatural about these creatures. They’re just animals.”

Just fauna, nothing magical at all. As if it could be that simple. Maybe it could be. For the first time, Willow sees how magic could be uncoupled from monsters, kept untainted by them. She says nothing.

Professor Patel goes on, “There are many of them, all over the world. We’re in the process of classifying and studying them. It’s what we do here. We aim to learn more about them, how we might use them for the good of mankind, how we can best mitigate the threat they pose. Any questions?”

Chris asks, “Where did they come from?”

“That depends on the species.” Professor Patel points a slimy looking creature directly below them. “I believe that one’s an ocean dweller, but for most, the preferred habitat is on land.”

Warren mutters, “Three guesses why.” He isn’t looking all that surprised so far as Willow can tell, and he glances at Chris with a smirk.

Chris’s eyes widen. “They eat people?!”

Professor Patel nods gravely. “Most would prey on you if they had the chance, which is why I need to go through some further safety protocols with you before I show you the holding area.” As she leads the way to a room off to the side of the vast foyer, Chris whispers to Willow, “Did you know about this?”

“Kind of. I mean, I knew about the scaly monsters, just not that we’d be studying them. At least not for sure.”

Chris glances back at the pit. “How’s it possible?”

Gently, Willow tells him, “You of all have to know things are possible that most people think aren’t.”

He looks flustered, but says nothing more. Warren is walking a little ahead of them and enters the room first after Professor Patel. It turns out to be a little waiting area or informal meeting room, furnished by a chair, which the professor takes, and a sofa, which Warren sits on in a way that takes up more room than it should, so that Willow and Chris have to perch beside him. Professor Patel takes them through various safety procedures: The fact that they must never enter the holding area unaccompanied, the electric shields that contain the creatures one to a cell and the panic button to press if one fails. Then she asks them, “Would any of you prefer to leave now?”

None of them would, though Willow wonders how tempted Chris is.

They walk down a flight of metal steps and into the pit. Here, Willow finds herself drawing back a little. It’s the smell that does it: Blood and other things. A huge demon is laid out on a table a few feet away, apparently unconscious, its cruel face slack. Professor Patel says, “Keep up” and Willow quickens her pace. Chris glances at her.

The go through a series of doors. Most open at the swipe of a card but at one Professor Patel scans her fingerprint and at the final one, her eyes are scanned at the touch of a button. They enter a little metal lined space overseen by a large refrigerator and a guy at a desk in a glass box in the corner. He nods at them. Warren mutters something about someone losing the job lottery, too low for anyone but Willow to hear. She kind of agrees: It must suck to sit here under a flickering strip light knowing that the exciting discoveries are being made not far away but the caged-up monsters are closer.

“We’re about to enter the holding area” the professor tells them, “The thing to remember here is always check the light is green.” She indicates an emerald-gleaming bulb over the door. “If it’s red, there’s a shield down. Brian here should be able to tell you who’s in there, which cell they’ve opened up and why. Never enter without checking – don’t just leave it up to Brian.”  
“If you assume I’ve forgotten” adds Brian, “I’ll assume you have. Human error, these things feed off it.”

“That’s literally” adds Professor Patel.

Chris gives a nervous sort of laugh. Brian, Willow realises, is sat beside the biggest tranquiliser gun she’s ever seen, and it’s not like she hasn’t seen a few.

Professor Patel shows them the vacuum tube that Brian uses to feed the specimens and the buttons he presses to open a hatch in the top of each cell. She opens the refrigerator to show them bags of blood and other things Willow doesn’t want to examine. Brian lets them into his little box to see the security footage playing out on his computer screen. Grainy rows of demons. Some pace, others sit listlessly. Willow wishes more looked unconscious like the ones in the pit. There’ll be a barrage of noise when they step through that door.

There’s not. After they’ve checked the light, after they step into the holding area, it’s quiet. Shuffles here and there, footsteps, but no roars or howls.

The demons look more out of place than Willow’s ever felt, and that’s saying something. They’re still dressed like demons – the ones that are dressed – and they still move like demons. It’s like someone invited them to a costume party and told them the wrong theme.

She’s never seen them under such good lighting before, and never really when there wasn’t a fight going on and there was time to really look. Except her vampire self, but vampires don’t count somehow. She’s used to vampires; it’s other demons she’s seen less of. Now she has time to stare at the stark details of them, the horns, the scales, the colours livid against white tiles. She hasn’t seen this many different varieties in one place before.

“They were all caught right here in Sunnydale” Professor Patel tells them.

Chris’s eyes widen. “All of them?”

“Yes, Sunnydale is a hotspot. We’re not clear on the reasons yet.”

Willow feels a shiver of guilt, like maybe she should tell. How are they supposed to study demons scientifically if they don’t know about the hellmouth? Then again, would they believe her? The hellmouth is a seething mass of malevolent energies, as well as being a portal to an actual place. However she put it, it would sound spiritual, nothing fauna about it. Maybe it would be better to stick to the bare fact of demons. Something they might be able to do something about.

“How long has this place been set up?” she asks.

“We’re a new enterprise.”

“Well, yea – yes, but it must have taken awhile to build this place and catch all these de- hostile sub-terrestrials.”

“We usually shorten it to HSTs” says the professor, “And yes, we’ve spent quite some time perfecting this set up. The HSTs were initially held in a temporary containment zone.”

They pass a cell containing a tall, green, robed thing. As it glides past, it meets Willow’s eye with its red gaze. She looks away quickly.

“So how do you take them down?” asks Warren, “Trancs, bullets?”

“Sometimes. More usually, tasers and electrified nets do the trick.”

They come to a cell with a vampire. It’s jarring seeing it in there, looking so human. She, really, not it. She sits with her head in her arms and her knees drawn up. Chris asks, “What –” and then stops when the vampire lifts her feed-ready face.

“HST five ten, Provectus sanguisuga. Don’t be fooled by the exterior: She’s strong.” As if to prove it, the vampire launches herself at them and they all leap back, with the exception of the professor, though Willow doesn’t miss her flinch. There is a crackle in the air, a lightning flash of light and the vampire hits the back wall of her cell, sinks to her knees panting. Willow wonders how many times she’s tried that before.

Chris asks, “Did that hurt her?”

“The extent to which they feel pain is still an open question” replies Professor Patel.

Chris turns back to the vampire, furrowing his brow. Warren, meanwhile, is examining the edges of the electric shield with interest. The vampire settles back into her original position, knees drawn, and hisses at them before she rests her head again.

The professor leads them to the end of the row and shows them an emergency exit which they are told leads to a storage area and a fire escape route. They go back the way they come, past the vampire and the pacing robed demon, past Brian. Back past the pit and on to the more laboratories. In the robotics lab, Warren is enthusiastic to the point of animation, even though there’s not much there besides a collection of metal arms and things that look like parts of guns. Not that Willow can’t see the potential in it all – the equipment is amazing – but she also senses that the potential Warren sees isn’t the same as the potential she sees. It really must be his thing. Next, the chem lab, and Chris, who has been silent since they left the holding cells, looks around with interest. There’s more activity here, and they are shown various ongoing experiments into possible antidotes for various demonic venoms. HST venoms. Willow thinks of Buffy, of how slayer healing can protect against so much but not poison.

The anatomy ward is simple and spotless. Willow supposes the equipment you need for that field of study is fairly straightforward and not the sort of thing you’d want to display. The air here is raw with recently applied disinfectant. Two doors leading off the lab are marked “restricted”. They don’t go through.

At the end of the tour, they head back to the waiting area they started in. “I don’t think I need to tell you how classified all this is” Professor Patel says.

Chris twitches. “We already got that message.”

The Professor hands them a final set of forms. “We understand that you may wish to back out” she says, “If that is the case then, subject to the possibility of surveillance should we have grounds to suspect you pose a security threat, you are completely free to do so. If, on the other, you do want to take up a place in our establishment, sign here.”

Beside Willow, Warren signs without hesitation.

Willow hesitates. Who wouldn’t? (Warren, apparently). There’s something at the back of her mind, something persistent that runs from her brain to form chills down her spine and over her arms when she thinks of those blood samples, that vampire girl and sterile anatomy lab.

But. But she’s watched Buffy carry more than any person should for three years now. Isn’t it time she had some support? Why shouldn’t the army fight demons? They’re supposed to protect citizens. Demons are a threat to citizens. It makes sense. And they can’t fight them if they don’t understand them.

This project could help. Isn’t that what Willow stayed in Sunnydale for, to help?

She signs.


	3. The Freshman

College starts properly and it’s amazing. The library is amazing. The dizzying arrays of causes and protests are amazing. The students are amazing, because they all chose to be here. It’s not like high school where every other person was resentful of the concept of education and ready to take it out on someone like Willow who happened to like it. Here everyone likes it. It’s why they’re all here, for the same thing. The collective focus of it is thrilling. And under their feet, all the time…If only they knew.

If only they knew, then the world would be a very different place. A part of Willow – a small part, but it’s there – wants to rip the surface off the campus and show them everything she’s seen this last week of what her parents thought was early college orientation. _Look_ , she wants to say, _there are the holding cells_. _I could name every demon in there. And over there, that pit, that’s where we find out all the secrets about them that mostly even they don’t know._ All that knowledge that even the most gifted students walking around on the surface don’t know is down there. It’s like they’re all mining and she’s found this perfect seam and she isn’t allowed to tell anyone.

Most of her doesn’t want to tell, though. It’s like a bell curve inside her head: A small part of her, off to the side, wants to get all the knowledge out into the open and share because it’s just so neat, but a larger swell that makes up most of her mind knows that that way lies badness. If people knew about the supernatural, dangerous knowledge would fall into the wrong hands. All the good people would be scared and – and this is more dangerous – so would all the bad people. And once it was out there would be no stopping it, it would just spill and spill across society and change everything. That’s why Buffy’s work has to be secret too: To stop everything spilling out of control, to stop the supernatural getting a footing in the human world via the human psyche.

And then there’s another little part of Willow, the other side of her internal spectrum, a part that is happy that this knowledge is all hers and she doesn’t have to share it.

Not that she’s allowed to share it anyway, so there’s no point dwelling on what that thought says about her. After all, she’s allowed something special, something all to herself, isn’t she? Buffy gets it. Buffy gets it as in gets something tangible, gets a strength no-one else can share. Physical strength in her case, rather than knowledge, but still. And Buffy gets it as in understands, knows what Willow has been through to earn this spot in the knowledge-of-the-supernatural club.

What Buffy doesn’t get, or doesn’t seem to, is college more generally. Willow tries to cheer her up by sharing her own enthusiasm, because nothing else is really an option. College is just amazing.

She’s nearing the end of her probational week at the Initiative, and already there’s no question that she’ll stay. Sure, some things going on down there are pretty scary, the demony parts, but she’s more on the tech side of things. It’s been a while since she really honed her tech skills – they kind of got blasted to the wayside by the magic – but it’s nice in a way to get back to them. Familiar. Familiar but exciting, because she’s taking skills she knew she had to a level she didn’t know about. Really, it’s great to be around people who really see her potential when it comes to tech. The gang are such novices that just her ability to do use a search engine was seen as the peak of her prowess but anyone can do that if they try. Not everyone can hack into the local government’s intranet like she had to do a few times with the Mayor, but the scoobies hadn’t realised that. To them, it was just another techy thing Old Reliable could do in the corner of the library. The Initiative, they understand. They know that Willow is doing what few could when she sets to work with their computers, sleeker and quicker than any she’s known.

When she’s not exploring the campus or underneath it, she researches defensive spells. Just in case. None of the demons in those holding cells look like something you’d like to come at you.

“Magic?” asks Buffy, when she comes in and sees her with a book from the old library.

“Just a project” says Willow.

She and Buffy didn’t actually arrange to share a room. Willow wanted to but anytime she planned to bring it up Buffy had to slay something and anyway, Willow had had a sort of idea that there might be some upsides to a roomie who doesn’t know her, like maybe the sort of roomie who won’t read too much into it if she reads _Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit_. Just to see what it’s like. Probably Buffy wouldn’t read much into it anyway, but she’s surprised Willow before. Plus, a roomie who doesn’t pop into her head when she’s with Oz? Also good. And anyway, Willow wants to make new friends too; it’s college, that’s part of what it’s for. So when Buffy was too busy slaying for that conversation, Willow let it slide and was allocated a stranger to share a room with, which was exciting for the first five minutes.

She spent two nights with the girl, Frankie, and it was so far from an environment conducive to studying that she’d asked Professor Walsh, her assigned mentor at the Initiative, if there was any chance she could spend the night in the night shift quarters. Professor Walsh asked enough to know what the problem was, and who Willow wished she’s been with instead, and had pulled strings to get Willow a room to share with Buffy after all. Luckily Buffy hadn’t hit it off with her roomie either.

Now Buffy asks, “So is the research something for –” and Willow looks at her quickly and meaningfully, and asks, “Hey, do you want to go for a walk?”

Buffy looks at her like she’s grown a second head. “A walk? At night? In Sunnydale?”

“I just feel like getting a coffee.”

Buffy, who isn’t as bad at undercover as she thinks, says, “Sure.”

Out on the edges of campus, sipping take out coffee, Buffy asks, “So, splainy?”

“I know it’s paranoid” says Willow, “It’s just, there are so many cameras down in the Initiative.”

Buffy frowns. “You think they’ve bugged our room?”

“Probably not, but I know they could.”

“Ew. Note to self: Don’t bring any boys home.” Buffy fixes Willow with a peeved look that is only half jokey. “I wish you’d mentioned that before we buddied up.”

“Sorry, Buffy. It’s probably nothing, it’s just, I know they can tap into the campus security cams and it’s a small step from there.” Willow feels a need for further justification, a sort of tangle of the wrongness of spying and the rightness of the clean, focused research area with its sleek computers. She adds, “I’m probably being paranoid because I’ve given away classified info just telling you about the place. I’d just rather we didn’t talk about it in our room.”

“Okay” says Buffy, slightly uneasily. “We’ll just have to talk about it some other place. Maybe Giles’?”

“Sure. I haven’t told them about Giles. Or we could go to Oz’s.” Willow feels like she should have spent more time at Oz’s this first week but between lectures and moving dorm rooms and underground secret military research base, she hasn’t found the time. She’s only seen him in the lectures they share and once for a date a few nights ago, a quick tour of his new place and then out again to a Take Back the Night meet.

They walk along for a bit. Buffy glances up when some guys shout somewhere off to the side, further into the campus, like she’s still not used to all these people being about. Willow asks, “So how were your lectures?”

“Okay, I guess.” Buffy says nothing more for a moment, and then she asks, “So what are you getting up to down there? Still computer work?”

“Mostly” replies Willow, “They’re making computer models based on different demon species so they can predict where they’re likely to be found, how they could spread if the population grows, how strong they get on different diets, that sort of thing.”

“Any chance they’ll share the intel?”

“I wish” says Willow, who is well aware how useful all that knowledge would be for Buffy. “But it’s still all top secret. But, hey, I could share. I mean, I’ve already made myself a criminal.”

Buffy smiles like this is a joke, although it’s really, really not.

Willow adds, “And I’ve been in the lab a bit. Analysing blood samples, that sort of thing.”

“Have you seen any more demons?”

“No, thank Hecate. Only on that first tour.”

“And how are they about the _thank Hecates_?”

“Oh, I still haven’t mentioned magic. I’m not sure they even know it exists.”

“They know about demons.”

“Yes, but demons are one thing. Demons are sub-Ts – just animals, but dangerous. Magic is a whole other thing. And it’s kind of a too private thing to share with them.”

“Good. I mean, you’re right, you shouldn’t tell them. Wait until you get more of an idea of them before you share something like that.”

“I don’t think they’d…” Willow begins, and trails off. Don’t think they what? “It’s just personal” she says. “I mean, there’s parts of magic I don’t even share with you.”

“Wait, what?” Buffy pouts. “I thought we shared everything.”

Willow feels herself blush. “Sommagisexuff” she mutters.

“Huh?”

“Sex stuff” Willow grinds out.

“Oh! Oh, then yeah, minimal sharing.” Buffy sips her coffee contemplatively. “So, you and Oz…”

“Just me.”

“Oh.”

“It’s a witch thing. Just strictly professional magic training.”

“Right. Strictly professional.” Buffy smiles and Willow forces herself to reciprocate, even though she’s caught up with thinking about how sex magic is just as effective with a partner and she really could do it with Oz, so why has she still not asked him?

Probably because he wouldn’t want to. He gets enough of the supernatural with the full moon. He wouldn’t want it being a part of them. Magic isn’t a happy, empowering thing for him the way it is for her.

So it’s doesn’t matter really that the magic’s always stronger when she thinks about…not Oz.

She hates these thoughts. She loves Oz. So why –

“Willow?”

“Huh?”

Buffy’s smile falters a little. “Wow, I guess you really are caught up in the whole double agent thing.”

Willow isn’t sure she likes the thought of being a double agent. Luckily, she can deflect the notion with, “Oh, Buffy’s there’re some vampires over there.”

“I know – I was just gonna ask you to hold my coffee.”

“Oh.” Willow takes the cup and stands back while Buffy shows down with the most college-themed vampires ever to vampire. It’s something of a wake up call about how drawn to campus they must be. All these young, transient people. Willow could easily believe some of these vamps must have been out here on campus all the way through all the changes of power in Sunnydale proper, just feeding off freshmen. Certainly they’ve been here long enough to feel confident in the face of the slayer, and it’s like there’s something vampiric about their confidence, something that saps Buffy’s usual swagger proportionately. Willow hasn’t seen Buffy this uncertain in a fight for years, and she steps back as the struggle shifts closer to her, only to have one of the vamps round on her.

She should have known. Obviously they knew she was there. As the vamp steps towards her, Willow thinks of the spell she was just reading about only to realise that wait, hot coffee. She flings both cups. One misses completely and the other barely splashes the vampire’s face, but it buys enough time for Buffy to fling off the two that were tackling her and grab the vampire advancing on Willow from behind. She throws him at the two who had hold of her. Then, to Willow’s surprise, Buffy grabs her arm and pulls her back the way they came, running at slayer speed until they reach the safety of the centre of campus.

Willow puts her hands on her knees, pants hard. “Whew. Buffy. What – I, err. Really not built for that kinda running here.”

“Sorry, Will.”

“No, no.” Willow waves a hand, then puts it back on her knee. “There’s the whole saved life thing. Just. I’m not built for running running, let alone slayer running. I’m more a steady amble kind of gal.”

“Steady amble sort of wouldn’t cut it.”

“Yeah, I got that.” Willow stands up at last. “No stake?”

“I did have one” Buffy tells her. She glances down. “Key word being _did_.”

“You can’t win ’em all.”

“I have to win them all, Willow. Or I’ll be dead.”

“Or you could just do the running thing.” Willow offers a smile. “For all it winds me? Definitely the right thing to do when things aren’t going your way. I know Giles would say so too.”

“But things should have been going my way” gripes Buffy. She glances around at the various groups of students passing on their way to parties, lowers her voice. “They were only vampires.”

“You’ll be ready for them next time.” As they make their way back to their room, Willow wonders if she should offer to report their sighting to the Initiative, but – glancing at Buffy’s closed face – decides not to. Buffy might feel like it’s undermining her. It wouldn’t be because Willow would put good money on Buffy getting those vamps before the Initiative can track them. The Initiative might be good, but they’re not the Slayer.

*****

One of the guys, Mike, had a cell phone when they arrived, but he wasn’t allowed to keep it. Xander had wondered how the sort of guy who walks around with a fancy cell phone ends up joining the military and whether he’d make it through basic. That was for the first five minutes. Ever since then, he’s just been focused on getting himself through basic, no thought at all about how anyone else is doing. No room for it. Turns out, in the army you push yourself to your limit and then you keep on pushing. 

Residual soldierly memories help. The scoobies might have joked about him having something to be grateful to Ethan Rayne about but, these days, Xander really kinda is. In a keeping things in perspective sort of way, of course: It’s not like Ethan set out to be useful. But any help, even the accidental kind? Very much welcome. Basic has passed in a blur of being shouted at in the welcome party’s “shark attack”, learning to be tidier than Giles is with his books, climbing walls, readying and using guns a blur-speed, crawling through mud, being yelled at while crawling through mud, readying and using bigger guns and carrying more than any human should carry at once. He has blisters on his blisters and left _Why does it even matter how my pants are folded?_ somewhere way back where he left taking the yelling personally.

But, for all it’s hard, somehow, he’s coping. They all are. Xander doesn’t know how the rest of the guys do it other than some of them arrived being manly men who man, and some must have had more to them than he realised, but in his own case, it must be all the demon fighting. The shark attack might have had a few unpalatable flashes of his dad, but when he remembered that he’d been up against the Mayor and survived that, it was easy. As for bruises, they were old news long ago. And it’s not like he hadn’t handled weapons before; even the scary-size ones they’ve shown them recently he’d either seen when he and Cordy stole the rocket launcher (and he’s so not going to mention that here) or has residual magic-induced memories of how they work, curtesy of Ethan. And while there aren’t stakes and crossbows here, it’s not like he hasn’t ever looked a thing in the eye and fired something, even if that something was old-school. It makes him think he can do this. Or at least that, so far, he hasn’t screwed up too badly.

So here they all are, sorer, musclier and still somehow still here. They arrived a collection of posturing guys and now they’re a unit way too tired for posturing, and just starting to be too self-assured to bother with it anyway.

Phone privileges are earned. When they heard that, a few of the guys assumed it would be more or less automatic unless something went badly wrong, like Principal Flutie was running the place and everyone gets a prize. Xander, with his pseudo-memories, knew better. But this week they did earn them, so Mike gets his cell phone back for a bit, and the rest of them have a couple of pay phones outside the dorm. Five minutes. Xander phoned his mom the first time and the call lasted two. Ever since, he’s phoned Willow and Buffy, alternating between them. Today, he has a new number, hastily scribbled down at the end of last week’s call: Willow’s dorm room. He smiles at the thought of Willow at college, happily geeking away. Dials.

Buffy answers. “Hello?”

“Buffy! Hi. I’m pretty sure I dialled Willow’s number. Tell me you didn’t wrestle her to get to the phone.”

He hears the smile enter her voice. “Relax, Xander, we’re not fighting over you.”

“Good. Because I think Willow could really do a number on you. So, how’s the big college life?”

“Big.” Buffy says that like it’s a bad thing. Then she says, “Willow’s not here. She says sorry and she loves you but she had to work on her, um, project.”

“Her um project, sure. Got to study those ums. So you came over to take the call?”

“Well, I was kind of waiting on tenterhooks in case they let you call, but also I just live here. What are tenterhooks, anyway?”

“Nothing we’ve covered here, but probably painful to wait on. So, living? As in rooming with the Wilster?”

“Yup. The girl they put her with was into the party hard, so she transferred to me because I’m really not.”

“I hear it’s overrated. So, dud roomies aside, how much is Willow embracing higher ed?”

“Oh, she’s embracing. Cuddling. Getting grabby with. Really I’m surprised I ever got her out of the library. It’s like someone poured miracle-gro on the high school library and sprinkled some computers on top.”

Xander takes a moment to picture Willow in her element. Weirdly, it’s good to know she’s still in Sunnydale. It really shouldn’t be – she’d be safer anywhere else – but still, it’s nice to think she and Buffy and Giles and Oz are together and where he left them. He asks, “And her project’s going okay?”

“Yeah but – um, yeah.”

“That good, huh?”

“She’s been a bit weird about talking about it. Or other people talking about it.”

“Gotcha.” Not a phone conversation then. He asks, “What about you? How’s college?”

“I’m okay.”

She sounds significantly less than okay. “Okay, Buffy, if you’re going to lie that bad over the phone, I really think you should sign up for drama. They do that there, right?”

“They do. They do pretty much everything from psych to vampires.”

“There’s a vamp class? You’ll slay at that.”

“No class, just a nest. But the way they had me on the run last night, I’m thinking I’d fail a class in them. Apparently I can’t even slay right here.”

“What, they have you on the ropes once and you give up? Who are you and what have you done with Buffy?”

“Okay, Xand, point taken.”

“So what are you waiting for?” Xander glances around and decides he’s in nowhere near a private enough situation to get too specific, so he says, “Go find them, do your thing, problem solved.”

“That’s what Giles said. Sorta. With a big side order of go away I’m busy being gross.”

“Gross Giles? That’s a version I haven’t met.”

“I don’t recommend it” says Buffy, “It involves him swanning about it a dressing gown past midday while some lady wears his shirt.”

 _Huh_ , thinks Xander, _go Giles_. He says, “Well, if gross-finally-getting-a-life Giles and me both say it, it must be true: You’ve got this.”

“Except I don’t” says Buffy, “I think I’d notice if I had.”

“Hey, Buffy? I’ve spent all summer hanging out with some really tough, capable guys and you know what? You’re still the strongest person I know.” It seems like a good idea to wait a beat and let that sink in, so he does. Then he says, “So I say it again: You’ve got this.”

“Okay” says Buffy with a sigh, “I guess I could be on my way to gotting it. I just need to do some research first.”

“I’m sure Willow and the guys will help.”

“No. No, Willow’s got enough to think about and Giles is busy being weird.”

“So ask Oz.”

“Nah. He might not be Willow but he’s still got the freshman thing to do.”

So does Buffy, of course, but she doesn’t mention that. Xander thinks of prom, of how keen she was for everyone else to enjoy the milestone, and feels a little pang for her. He says, “I’d help if I could.”

“You are helping. Just the talking through is helping. I think I need a plan.”  
“Right, becau –” Xander stops as he catches sight of Drill Sergeant Matthewson looking at him like he wants a word. He sighs inwardly because that’s where you keep sighs in the army. “Buffy, I’ve got to go.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, I probably just folded my pants wrong. Good luck with the nest.”

“Bye, Xander.” She hangs up, leaving Xander to approach Matthewson, who tells him, “At ease, Private.”

Xander relaxes on command. Not a pants thing then. The drill sergeant indicates a couple of buildings near the dorm, a collection of offices and storage areas. “Let’s walk.”

Walk apparently means follow, because Matthewson takes a definite lead as they approach the buildings. Xander follows him inside one of the offices and salutes at the sight of either a First Sergeant or a Sergeant Major. The insignia is annoyingly similar but Xander decides he’ll go with salute worthy either way. There’s another guy there too, a guy in a suit, but he’s secondary because Xander doesn’t need to salute for him. At least as far as he knows. The unidentified sergeant is standing beside a desk and the suit is sitting at it, which makes sense. One of the main lessons from the army so far? That people can stand way longer than they think they can.

Matthewson says, “This is First Sergeant Weston, Agent Dalton.”

The two men nod in turn as he speaks. First Sergeant, right. And an agent, huh. Xander can’t remember agents coming up when they learnt about rank.

First Sergeant Weston says, “At ease, Private” and Xander relaxes gratefully but somewhat confusedly. Because what is this?

Agent Dalton says, “We hear you’re a Sunnydale boy?”

Xander wants to glance at Drill Sergeant Matthewson but stops himself. Replies, “Yes” Should he say sir? Agent? “sir, born and raised.”

“You got family still there?”

Xander thinks of Willow and Buffy. “Yes, sir.”

Agent Dalton types something into a gadget on the desk, an electronic organiser of some sort. Willow would know.

First Sergeant Weston says, “Dismissed, Drill Sergeant” and Matthewson salutes and leaves.

Agent Dalton asks, “So you’ve lived in Sunnydale all your life? Went to Sunnydale High?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You were in the class of ’99?”

“Yes, sir.”

First Sergeant Weston says, “The class of ’99 were made of strong stuff from what I hear.”

Xander doesn’t answer because it doesn’t sound like a question. Inwardly, he thinks, _damn right_.

The First Sergeant adds, “Your Drill Sergeant says you’re showing promise.”

Xander’s lip twitches and he schools his smile back to blank. “I’m doing my best, First Sergeant.” Like there’s something else to do here.

Agent Dalton asks, “Your MOS?”

“Infantry, sir.” Xander kind of wishes the man would tell him not to call him sir. Sure, you call a First Sergeant First Sergeant, but who is this guy?

The guy makes another note. Says, “We’re here to inform you you’ve been reassigned. You’re being fast tracked: You’ll be out of here by the end of the week.”

Fast tracked? End of the week? It feels like something Snyder would do; Hey, you’re doing a good job, let’s reward you with making you do all this semester’s work in one week.

The agent goes on, “You’ll start your AIT next week in Sunnydale.”

Whoa. Sunnydale? No way that’s not joining Willow’s project. Just no way. The base in Sunnydale doesn’t have much of a specialty, at least not until the military took an interest in demons. Are they offering him this chance just because he’s from Sunnydale? Or have they looked into his past, found out more about the class of ’99 than they’re telling?

Or maybe he really is doing well?

Xander says, “Thank you, sir.” In the military, questions, like sighs, are to be kept on the inside.


	4. Living Conditions

Xander had thought being stationed in his home town would stop him missing the gang but it actually makes it worse. Back in Georgia, the scoobies had been this whole other section of his life, a section that he could come back to when he was done training and find unchanged, a section kept in a separate part of his brain from the now. Here in Sunnydale, he is hyper-aware of them being just a few miles off, not on pause at all but very much living their own lives sans Xander.

Hence it being a very big deal when he is able to take a day’s leave and get over to Giles’, apparently the centre of operations now.

Centre of operations: He’s even thinking about the scoobies in soldier speak now. Huh. Then again, the scooby gang are all about the defending of the innocent so why not?

There’s a barrage of hugs from Willow and Buffy as soon as he gets through the door, Willow’s soft and jasmine scented, Buffy’s fierce in a slayer-holding-back sort of way, like being hugged by a careful giant. Oz and Giles do the manly nod thing. God, it’s good to see them all.

“You’re so tanned!” Willow tells him and Buffy says, “I was expecting more muscle.”

Xander says, “After all that rope climbing, I gotta believe there’s some muscle there that wasn’t. And the tan’s curtesy of Georgia in summer.”

“I think there’s muscle” says Willow, running a hand up and down his arm, “Don’t you think?”

Oz feels Xander’s other arm. “Definite musclage.”

“Sorry” says Buffy. She reaches to run a hand over his chest and shoulders. “I guess I was just expecting the Hulk and you still look like Xander.”

“I was doing basic, Buff, not nuclear research.” Xander wonders at what point the three of them are going to stop stroking him and the answer turns out to be when Giles says, “Why don’t we give Xander a moment to sit down before more cuddling. Tea, anyone?”

Giles heads into the kitchen and the rest of them all pile onto the sofa, ending up with Xander in the middle and Willow and Buffy either side. Oz perches beside Willow for a moment before pulling a chair closer. “So” says Willow, “Tell us everything.”

So Xander tells. He tells them about obstacle courses and obsessive cleaning and the food. He tells them more about M240Bs than they probably wanted to know. He tells them about how his FTX was brought forward and about how that was weird, not getting to do it with the guys.

“So who did you do it with?” asks Willow. Oz asks, “Also what is it?”

“Field training exercise” Xander explains, “Pretty much the final exam. They flew me and this other guy they picked out to Oklahoma where there’s three more guys going on the Sunnydale programme and we did it there. And any doubt this whole thing is a demon fest pretty much evaporated when it turned out our mission was to track and neutralise this thing they set loose in a controlled environment.” At least, they had said it was controlled. Xander isn’t entirely convinced the security measures they were told had been placed around the perimeter of the 15 square mile area they were tracking the demon in would be enough if he were living nearby but it didn’t turn out to matter: They had located and very much neutralised it as instructed.

“Neutralise as in kill?” asks Willow, “Or are they training you to do the whole gathering live specimens thing?”

“We killed it, but if we wanted to tranc it or something, it’s pretty much the same process: Find it, make it so it can’t eat you. Just different tools.”

“What kind of demon was it?” asks Oz like it matters. So far as Xander can see, it doesn’t, outside of werewolves and werewolves aren’t demon enough to count as demons. He replies, “Big, scaly, the usual. Gave us a good run around – really it was the finding that was the issue.”

Oz gives a little frown. Xander wonders if maybe it is the werewolf thing making him feel…what? Kinship with the thing? No way. The demon had been all teeth and malice, about as far from Oz you can get. He adds, “And for the guys who hadn’t seen a demon before, they had to get past the holy macaroni what is that stage.”

“So some of them were already aware of their existence?” asks Giles, returning with a tray of tea.

“Yeah, turns out one guy got attacked by something when he was a kid, spent a lot of time in therapy being told it was just a big –” Xander swallows the word _dog_ , glancing at Oz “animal.”

“Huh” says Oz quietly, looking down.

“I don’t think it was a werewolf” says Xander quickly, “Because he’s not one.”

“Maybe a hell hound” suggests Buffy.

“Right” says Xander, “So he’s feeling pretty darn vindicated. And another guy’s from Cleveland which he seems to think was why they chose him.”

“There is a hellmouth in Cleveland” puts in Giles.

“Wait” says Buffy, “What?”

“The one in Sunnydale is more potent” Giles tells her.

“So I get to tell Steve that my hellmouth can beat up his hellmouth?” asks Xander, “Good to know.”  
Willow asks, “So the other guys just found out about demons when one came at them?”

“Well they did join the army, Will. They had to know something was going to come at them, just not how scaly it would be.”

“And now you’re all signed up with the Initiative?” asks Buffy.

Xander nods, “Had the tour, done the orientation programme, got the t-shirt. Well, actually not. They didn’t give us a t-shirt.”

“Wouldn’t be very sneaky” says Willow. Which, actually, good point: All of this is supposed to be classified. Sure, he can talk about it with Willow, but the rest of them? Not so much. Xander feels uneasy about that for a moment. Willow made the whole choice to join on the basis of finding out what the whole operation was, but Xander just joined the army. No plan to betray anything. Yet he’s just done it completely unplanned. Just so used to talking demons with the scoobies, he supposes. And now it’s done.

Not that he’s quite told them everything, because the debrief after the field training exercise was almost as intense as the training itself. They’d all gone in separately to be asked about whether they’d seen a sub-T before, where, how many, what they knew about them, all the stuff those in the know had been holding back from sharing up until now. He’d told them about Sunnydale High, the disappearances, the graduation. He hadn’t told them about slayers and witches. They hadn’t asked, is what he told himself. But also, not really his secrets to tell.

He’d told them about Jesse. They’d been interested in that. There had been a definite re-living factor but at least it had focused him, reminded him what demons really were and how badly they needed killing.

“…no fair I wasn’t around” Willow is saying.

Xander blinks. “Huh?”

“When you did the orientation” she prompts. “I was given a study day, all lectures and homework.”

“You like lectures and homework.”

“Not as much as I like seeing you after ten weeks.”

“We wouldn’t have been allowed to chat anyway, Will.” Despite this, a grin breaks over Xander’s face.

“You’re right” she says, “This is better.”

“A proper reunion” Buffy agrees.

“Exactly” says Xander, “So, in the spirit of that, what about you guys? I don’t hear you telling everything.”

“Not much to tell” says Buffy, “College. Lectures. Turns out Willow eats your sandwich without asking.”

“That was one time” says Willow.

“Her greatest flaw” confirms Xander.

“Oh” says Buffy, patting him suddenly, and probably harder than she intended, “Are you going to be our TA?”

“What?”

Willow explains, “Some of the Initiative guys are doubt agent TAs. They live on campus, help out in class.”

“Bit of a flaw in me doing that” says Xander, but he doesn’t feel the sting comments like that usually carry. Usually it stings more when someone else says something about his lack of book-learning, hence the pre-empting, but there’s always been a sting to them none the less. Now, not so much. “No, I’m going to be back in barracks whenever I’m not in the facility. No college life for me.”

Buffy pouts. “So we hardly get to see you and we’re stuck with Riley?”

“You’ll see me, just not in your lectures. Which, great, because I’m so done with formal ed.”

“Anyway” says Willow, “Riley’s nice.”

“Nice compared to Chris” Buffy points out.

“Chris is okay” says Willow, “It’s Warren I can’t stand.”

Xander wonders which of the several young scientists he saw on his tour was Warren. Being a better person than Frankenstein Chris seems like a low bar to smack right into.

Giles asks, “Chis is the chap who seemed a little unnerved by the whole thing, yes?”

“Yeah” Willow confirms, “He took a while to sign the forms and I can tell he still isn’t completely sure about all of it.”

“Are any of us?” murmurs Oz. Willow glances at him a little sharply, Xander thinks. Buffy shrugs and says, “They seem to be good guying with the killing demons.”

“And capturing them” Oz points out.

“Well, and that.” Buffy frowns. “But I’m not about to join the Society Against Cruelty to Demons.”

Xander nods. “Got to say I’m with you there.”

“I’m not pro free range monsters either” says Oz, “Just, if a thing can’t be free range, isn’t dead a better option than battery?”

“Great” says Xander, “Make it sound like they’re food. Remind me to stick to the veggie option when I check out the college canteen won’t you?” He grins but Oz’s brief answering smile is more humouring-Xander than actually amused.

Giles says, “I’m sure it’s not exactly pleasant for the creatures involved but whatever they’re doing to these demons has a purpose. I have no qualms with them studying demons so long as the aim if the study is –”

“Non evil?” Buffy suggests.

“Precisely.”

Buffy turns to Willow and Xander. “Care to step in with assurances of non-evil?”

“I’m still analysing tissue samples and building computer models” says Willow, “They haven’t exactly been forthcoming about why.”

“And I’ve just been given the tour” says Xander, “Shown the changing rooms, that sort of thing.”

“The demons in cells?” asks Oz.

“Well that, and I’m not saying there’s no ick factor. I mean, I’m as anti-unneeded pain as the next non-psychopath but add the amount of demons these guys have captured or killed to Buffy’s total and the town’s safer than it would have been without them.”

Oz gives a little nod, a thoughtful frown. Xander wonders how long he’ll mull it over. Probably longer than Xander ever thinks about anything. Probably that’s why Xander’s job is to catch a dozen demons in the time it takes Oz to decide if they have rights or not. “Come on, guys” he says, “It’s the army.” He remembers, and corrects himself, “ _We’re_ the army. Isn’t that enough proof of non-evil?” Because it has to be, doesn’t it? His friends can hardly think the American army is up to something world ending. And even if they did, they can’t think he’d be.

“Well” says Willow, “Usually, yeah. But there’s the tech companies helping with the funding and equipment. We don’t know their motive. Even if it’s helping people right now with the lack of demons, Giles is right, we need to know the end game.”

There it is again, that assumption that now he’s back in Sunnydale he’ll be on team scooby instead of team avoid-a-military-tribunal. Xander glances at Buffy. “Right. Yeah.”

“Whatever they want” says Buffy, “I’m not betting on them being capital E evil. After all, they got Xander home. How bad can they be?”

*****

“Hi again” says Riley when Willow sees him in the bio lab, because she’s already seen him in class. Seeing him around campus is weird because she has to pretend she hardly knows him. Actually, she doesn’t, but she knows him better than she has to pretend she does. Willow flashes a smile. “Hi” She bends back over the microscope and twists the fine adjustment. Demon skin cells shift into focus beneath her eye. They look a lot like human cells. You actually have to go surprisingly deep to find the differences.

Riley puts a sample tube down on the table beside her. “Professor Patel asked me to give you this from the Type T sub species.”

“Oh.” Willow reaches for it. Blood sloshes inside. She glances at Riley. The soldiers don’t often come in here and this is the first time since she’s been here that a soldier delivered a sample. “How come? I mean, I didn’t think you guys had time to hang around the store waiting to deliver things.”

“It’s not from the store – It’s straight from the tap. We brought a new one in just now.”

“Oh.” Willow slips the tube into a test tube rack. “Oh, so the tap as in…?”

“The vein.”

Willow feels herself frown which she has to admit to herself doesn’t make much sense. All the samples in the freezer in the store came from demons. This blood isn’t ickier just because it came straight out of a demon today.

It feels ickier. Maybe it’s knowing that it’s the demon’s first day here. Usually she doesn’t know anything about the demon the samples came out of, if they’re even still around. This time, she knows one is pacing out the parameters of its cell for the first time, wondering what happened and why there’s a cut on its arm. Or maybe it’s Riley being here, making it impossible not to think of him pinning the thing down to help Professor Patel take the sample. It’s different from the blood in the store, it comes with a story attached. “Thanks.”

Riley smiles again. He seems as eager to please down here as in class, and as ready to smile. Willow can’t help but wonder if that reflects badly on him, the smiling like this is as normal as a lecture hall and all the things that happen here just as cleanly useful.

But then, she’s here, isn’t she?

Riley leaves with an easy wave and Willow focuses on the skin cells, the huddled uniformity of them. She can’t help wondering if maybe her doubts are really Oz’s doubts. He’s wigged about the whole Initiative thing, and though Willow knows no-one here would hurt a werewolf, she can’t really blame him. He sees the whole thing from a different angle, a there but for the grace of the moon goes me sort of angle. She figures her being here to keep an eye on things will help reassure him in the long run. And he has to know it’s an opportunity for her. Does know, in fact, because he hasn’t asked her to stop.

*****

When she’s finished her shift, she goes to meet Buffy in the canteen. The guys aren’t there – Oz has band practice and Xander’s doing army stuff. Willow supposes she’s going to have to get used to Xander not being around a lot even though he’s so nearby, which is weird. Now he’s back in Sunnydale, she feels almost like she has first dibs on him, like the army should check with her before they arrange his timetable. Which is silly, but she can’t help it. He’s Xander, and him being home but not, around but not, it’s weird. Unnatural weird.

Unnatural like trying to stab your roommate with a fork, which is what a girl at the next table does. Luckily Buffy’s arrived by then and a guy walking past with his tray helps out too, which would be useful if it was just Willow pinning the girl down, but Buffy’s kind of got this. Willow takes a second to recognise the girl: Frankie, the girl she roomed with before she got to share with Buffy. She supposes the delayed recognition is because she isn’t used to seeing Frankie not surrounded by people partying. Or trying to stab someone with a fork. Noticing the fork again, Willow darts forward and plucks it from Frankie’s hand before she can twist away from Buffy and use it on the guy who’s helping to restrain her.

Once she’s struggled a bit, Frankie gives up and glares at them all.

“I can’t believe they put me with her” the girl who was almost forked says, “I very clearly asked for a stable non-smoker. Oh, hi, Buffy.”

“Kathy” Buffy says. Willow has another moment of belated recognition: This is Buffy’s former roommate. They must have done a straight swap. Buffy smiles tightly and says, “Fancy seeing you here.” She adjusts her grip on Frankie as the girl resumes her struggle with a sort of snarl and says, “Let me go!”. The trying-to-be-helpful guy makes a show of putting more weight into holding her and Buffy lets him, staring up at Kathy who says, “Well it is the canteen”. Obviously, there’s a crowd gathering by now because fork crimes don’t happen every day. Willow shifts to try to shield Frankie from the onlookers but can’t make herself actually talk to them and tell them to back off. Turns out, being a double agent doesn’t make you magically able to tell off strangers. Apparently, nor does doing magic.

Kathy says, “So did you find out why they swapped us? Because I thought we were getting along just fine and then suddenly they move me in with this psycho who throws parties every night and –”

“I did until you put everyone of coming!” snaps Frankie.

“Maybe we should get her out of here” says Buffy hastily.

“And take her where?” asks Kathy, “Not back to our room!”

Frankie retorts, “You think I want to go back to Cher central?”

Kathy glares. The would-be-useful-if-not-for-the-slayer guy asks, “Should I call campus security?” and then he flashes a grin and says, “Oh, I’m Parker by the way.”

“Hi” says Buffy, “I’m –”

“Tara!” yells Frankie.

Buffy says, “Um. Good guess but I’m Buffy.”

Frankie struggles, calls out, “Tara, get them off me!”

Willow follows her gaze to see a pretty blonde girl in a long denim skirt weaving through the crowd towards them. She takes in the scene, eyes widening. Kathy greets her with, “Yesterday you told me we just needed to talk, today she tries to stab me with a fork! Is she on some sort of medication I need to know about?”

The blonde girl gives her friend a quick, searching look. “Frankie?”

“Like you wouldn’t stab her!” says Frankie.

Buffy asks the blonde girl, “Do you know her?”

The blonde girl nods. “Y-yes. Um, Frankie, maybe you could come back to my room and um, c-calm down a bit?” She glances between the girl and Kathy. “I think you guys need some time apart.”

Buffy huffs out a little laugh. “And the award for understatement goes to…?”

“I’m Tara.” Tara looks over her shoulder as some commotion in the doorway tells them someone already called campus security or at least that more people are arriving to gawp. “So, Frankie, you want to come to my room?”

“Sure” says Frankie, “Just as soon as I finish with Kathy.”

Buffy smiles a false smile. “Kathy, that would be your cue to leave.”

“Oh, don’t worry” says Kathy, “I’m going straight to _my_ room and calling the accommodation office. This just isn’t acceptable!” As she leaves, Frankie bucks and writhes, trying to reach her before she stomps out of sight. Parker swears under his breath, gripping her shoulders while Buffy actually stops her escaping. Willow asks Tara, “You don’t mind her going in your room?”

“Oh, she’s not normally like this. Really, I think there’s –” She stops.

“What?” Out of the corner of her eye, Willow can see Buffy look up, fix her gaze on Tara.

“Nothing.” Tara gives a forced smile.

“Well” says Buffy, “If you don’t mind her in your room, it’s got to be better than waiting for security.” She pulls Frankie upright, dislodging Parker. “For her at least. Maybe not for Kathy, but...” Buffy shrugs. “I’m sure she can sort something out.”

Frankie snaps, “I am here, you know! It’s up to me where I go!”

“Not until we talk” chides Tara. To Buffy, she asks, “Could you help me get her out of here safely?”

“Sure” says Buffy. Parker chips in with, “I’ll come too. Just in case you need some help.”

“I got this” says Buffy, “But thanks.”

In the end, Parker does tail them some of the way to Tara’s room, even though Frankie calms down a bit and doesn’t need Buffy or Parker holding her so much as Tara wrapping an arm around her shoulders. Willow walks on her other side, not sure if Tara and Frankie want them there anymore but unable to shake the hunch that maybe this is less a run of the mill fork attack and more a hellmouth-related fork attack. Buffy walks a little way behind, maybe thinking the same thing, and also very definitely flirting with Parker. Parker who is with them even though Buffy said he didn’t need to be and who totally faked being stronger and more useful than he actually was back there, but, Willow reasons, anyone to help Buffy get over Angel should be welcomed. But, well, anyone doesn’t have to be Parker.

He’s gone by the time they reach Tara’s room, where Tara has Frankie lie on the bed, and then runs her hands over her forehead in a gesture that has her sleeping almost immediately. Either Tara’s presence is even more soothing than Willow is getting the impression it is, or, “Sleeping spell?”

Tara looks up guiltily at Willow, then glances at Buffy.

“It’s okay” says Buffy. She indicates Willow. “You’re not the first wicca I’ve met.”

“O-oh” says Tara, then, “Oh, do you go to the wicca club?”

“I’ve been meaning to” says Willow.

“Me too” says Tara, “It clashed with a study group I had last year, but now…” She gives a little shrug. “It’s w-working up the courage, I guess. And then this happened with Frankie…” She turns to the girl on the bed. “I don’t think it’s natural. She’s always been a bit unpredictable but this? It isn’t her.”

“Magic?” asks Buffy with a frown.

“Wait” says Willow, “Frankie’s a witch?” If she’d known that, she might have stuck around for some of the parties.

But Tara shakes her head. “No, she just” She ducks her head shyly, then masters herself and meets their eyes again. “She’s my ex. B-but only from briefly.”

“Oh” says Buffy, “I. Right.”

It’s only a moment but Willow sees it. Then Buffy collects herself and asks, “But the fork staby weirdness could be magic?”

Tara nods. “It has to be. She wouldn’t do this otherwise. B-but I can’t think of any spell that would do this.”

“It is weird” says Willow, “Actually nor can I.”

Buffy shrugs. “Let’s take it to Giles.”

*****

When a little gaggle of children arrive at his door, Giles tries not to appear too enthusiastic, though his day – like so many recently – has been rather aimless without company.

Buffy and Willow have brought a stranger with them, a young lady called Tara who accepts tea and cake with a timid smile before recounting the recent strange behaviour of another girl, who is, apparently, currently under the influence of a sleeping spell on her bed.

They research while consuming more tea and cake. It’s rather futile; though Tara has provided a detailed account, no magic or supernatural influence is readily apparent. They have only Tara’s word that this girl Frankie hasn’t always been the sort of person to come at someone with a fork, but Tara seems very earnest and this is a hellmouth town, so they persist.

“We could try magic” chirps Willow after an hour of persisting, “A spell of revelation maybe?”

Usually, Giles would insist they read more first, not entirely comfortable with how quickly she reaches for magic, but given how vague the problem is and the fact Tara’s sleeping spell will wear off soon, he agrees and provides the necessary equipment.

It is a two person spell, and before Giles can offer his services, Willow turns to Tara, and asks, “Are you okay to do it with me?”

Tara smiles and nods. Giles becomes aware of a subtle magic lingering about her, soft and pearlescent, very unlike Willow’s but not uncomplimentary. There was a time that he would have noticed it straight away, but the days when magic was central to his life are long gone now.

As Willow and Tara do the spell, Giles takes the tea things into the kitchen. Somehow, remaining in the room while the two women cast together seems intrusive. Which is ridiculous, since there is no question of intimacy between the witches, no reason to suppose their energies could be complimentary if they were to attempt sex magic. Yet it is Ethan he thinks of as he sets the tray down beside the sink.

Perhaps Buffy gets the odd impression of intrusion too, because she follows him as if instinctively giving the other young ladies space. She leans on the counter, comments in an undertone, “Looks like the wiccas have it handled. Maybe I’m not even needed.”

“You did prevent a stabbing” Giles reminds her.

At that moment, the spell in the next room takes effect in a sudden rush, sending a book spinning from its shelf. Giles and Buffy hurry back in, in time to see the volume fall between Willow and Tara. It flutters open. The two witches rein in their magic and let go of one another’s hands, but continue to stare at each other a little breathlessly, leaving Buffy to pick up the book.

For all that she is by now looking a little bored, Buffy is careful to keep the book open on the page it settled on. “Mok’tagar Rites and Rituals” she reads. She raises an eyebrow at Giles. “Mok’tagar? How come there are always new demons I didn’t know about before?”

“Demons?” asks Tara in concern, climbing to her feet.

“Buffy’s the Slayer” explains Willow, also standing up. Then her eyes widen and she says, “Oh, sorry Buffy! Can I tell her that?”

Buffy regards her with fleeting annoyance then shrugs, turns back to the book. Giles hopes Willow is more careful with her own secret identity, but suspects her carelessness is due to the difficulty in keeping one’s guard up around someone one has recently done magic with. Even now, he has to be colder than he’d sometimes like when Ethan re-emerges, just to keep them on an appropriate footing.

Tara, meanwhile, is smiling a shy smile at Buffy. “Wow. So, so you’ve saved the world?”

Buffy looks a little embarrassed. “Well I don’t like to brag.”

“Wow. Um, thank you.”

Buffy is flustered for only a moment. It occurs to Giles that this must be the first time she’s been thanked by a stranger. He shouldn’t feel taken aback by that – a key part of a watcher’s job is, after all, to impress upon the Slayer the importance of secrecy – but he is startled by the idea for just a moment. Buffy ought to be thanked.

Buffy shrugs. “Meh, I live here. So, Giles, Mok’tagar? And how many more demons until we have the full set?”

“A thousand at least” replies Giles, “And that’s not counting interdimensional demons like the Mok’tagar.”

Buffy sighs. “And here was me hoping I could make good on my hellmouth membership card, slay two hundred demon species, get a free cupcake.” She quickly scans the text in her hands. “Oh. Ew.”

“What?” asks Willow.

It transpires that another spell is needed, this time to secure Frankie’s soul. This is a complex procedure, and Giles expects to have to help this time, but Willow and Tara seem to assume that they will again work the magic unaided, and so he leaves them to it. “And I’ll go find Kathy” says Buffy, “I’m guessing I’ll know when the spell’s done?”

“I hope so” Giles replies, “Don’t do anything if not – I’m not sure what would happen to Frankie if you were to slay Kathy with her soul inside her.”

“Not looking to slay anything with a soul anyway” says Buffy and leaves.

She doesn’t return that day, simply phones from her room forty minutes later to report that slaying wasn’t necessary as Kathy’s father appeared to take her home. Willow and Tara have also left by this point, Tara to check on Frankie and Willow to meet Oz. Giles is aware that they have made firm arrangements to attend some sort of magic club together.

He is once again alone, but heartened by the visit. Finding that his presence here on the hellmouth can still be useful is welcome. He managed to keep himself busy over summer, first with his books and then with Olivia’s visit, but with her gone, he has been questioning why he is still here. Helping Buffy is, as ever, the answer, even if she has more in her life now besides slaying and research. That is what he has long wanted for her, and he refuses to begrudge her it. Giles collects himself, and makes dinner for one. 


	5. The Harsh Light of Day

Now that Willow has been shown the elevator in the frat house, getting into the lab is easier. Before, there was a lot of checks and waiting for clearance, now it’s just the retinal scan and her voice offered to a little box in the wall of the elevator. When she got her final clearance and was shown this way in by Forest, she did ask him how come the elevator opened for her before the voice check. “I mean” she had said, “If someone tried to get in who wasn’t supposed to, wouldn’t it be better to not let them get that far?”

Forest had shaken his head. “It’s better not to let someone trying to infiltrate us wander off when they can’t get in. Better to know about them. Don’t worry, if someone did get in, the voice recognition would catch them out, and then there’d be counter measures.”

“What sort of counter measures?”

Forest had smiled a twisted sort of smile. “Nothing you want to know about.”

Willow had made a note to herself to never come in this way if she had a cold. Today, though, her voice is its usual self. Tonight, really – an evening shift. Arriving in the loading area beside the pit, she is a little surprised to find Chris and Warren have apparently been down here long enough to take a coffee break. Usually they work the same hours. They stand by the railing, Warren lounging against them, Chris just far enough from them that he couldn’t see what’s down there. Chris greets her with, “Hi, Willow” but he doesn’t smile.

“Hi Chris. Warren.” Willow has to put a little effort into sounding as pleased to see Warren as she is to see Chris. She asks, “Did you guys get an earlier shift?”

Warren, who glanced up at her approach, looks away with a smirk. Chris says, “Not really, just a meeting.”

Willow gets that panic that she might have missed something, but then she remembers she checked her emails just this morning and that no-one paged her on her new Initiative-issued pager, so it’s worse: She wasn’t invited. “Anything exciting?”

Chris seems about to say no, but Warren gets there first with, “Special project. Classified. I’m surprised you weren’t there, actually. I assumed it’d be all of us. I guess me and Chris have what they’re looking for, for something like this.”

Chris glances at the ground and Willow assumes for a second he’d just rather look at the ground than at Warren, but then she realises, no, it’s something else. He looks sick, pale.

Warren adds, “I know you’ve been really helpful with those blood samples though.”

There’s no point asking anyone to open up around Warren, so Willow sets concern for Chris aside and asks, “They mentioned the blood work in meeting? Is it for the project?”

Warren twitches in a way that might be a head shake, or just shaking off her question. “Like I said, the project’s classified” he says. He gives a little laugh and adds, “Looks like this is a job for the men.”

Wow, thinks Willow, really mature. She thinks about saying it out loud, but isn’t sure that wouldn’t come off as immature too. She decides it wouldn’t, but by then, Chris is speaking again: “I guess it depends what your specialisms are. What they want you to do.” The award for eye contact wouldn’t usually go to Chris, but he looks at her for long enough now that Willow wonders if he’s hinting at something. He adds, “Anyway, I’ve got to get to over to the holding area. See you, Willow.”

“Bye, Chris.” Willow moves off before Warren can engage her in conversation. She needn’t have worried, she realises, glancing back; below them, in the pit, a group of soldiers are dragging in a slimy looking something which is putting up an almost-fight, a sort of jerking, dragging motion, like it’s trying to shy away from their touch. Warren watches with private smile.

Once she’s in the lab, prepping human blood for a control study, Willow thinks about specialisms. What are Chris and Warren’s? Anatomy and robotics. What sort of project would require a combination of those two? The answer is all sorts of things but where she comes up short is what it would have to do with demons.

“And aren’t demons our thing?” she asks Oz later, “I thought demons were our thing. But robots and demons, I’m not sure how they’d mix.”

Oz, slumped in a chair while she wanders his bedroom, looks thoughtful. “It’d be an interesting combo” he says.

Willow sits down on his bed. “An interesting thing I don’t get to see” she says morosely, “Or at least, not yet. Maybe I’ll be involved later on.”

“Hopefully.”

“I mean, I didn’t get involved in all this scientific-truth seeking just to come up against classified!”

“I was going to say you didn’t sign up to keep an eye on the Initiative just to come up against classified.”  
“Well that too. But I didn’t get involved just to report back to Buffy. Some of it’s pretty interesting. Finding out how the demon blood behaves, it’s making me feel like I felt at middle school science fairs, all hyped for the discoveries.”

Oz smiles at her, but then it fades and he asks, “I wonder how werewolf blood behaves?”

That’s a good question. Willow wonders how it would respond to the various tests she’s been doing if it was taken on the full moon compared to when the werewolf was in human mode. But obviously, “That’s different. Werewolves are human. I mean, most of the time.”

“And yet I don’t see you clamouring to find out how I can volunteer as a free-to-leave-anytime walk-in test subject.”

Willow frowns. “Well, you didn’t ask me to.”

“But if I did, would you?”

“No” Willow replies automatically. Then she considers. “No, I guess not.” She’s ninety nine percent certain that if Oz were to visit the Initiative as a known werewolf to give a few blood samples, he would be allowed to leave without a fuss. That one percent is not worth his safety. “They don’t even know you exist. Any more than they know about my magic.”

“So, it’s not a middle school science fair so much as a secret government project.”

“Okay, Oz, if I want to be patronised, I have Warren for that.”

“Sorry. Just dwelling on the danger here.”

“I know it’s dangerous. It’s just that it’s exciting with the new knowledge as well. I’m a witch, it’s not like I’m unfamiliar with the two mixing.” As soon as she says it, she’s wishing she hadn’t. Oz worries enough about the magic. Sure enough, he replies, “Well, you know my thoughts about that.”

“Yeah. I do.”

“I just don’t want to see you hurt.”

“And nor do I. But nothing I’m doing is about to hurt me. The Initiative are giving me a chance to learn things that could keep me safe and the magic –”

“Could keep you safe from the Initiative?” asks Oz.

Willow feels herself tense. “It’s a backup” she says, “You know that. Anyway, I’m not only studying protection spells.”

Oz doesn’t look reassured, but they have wordlessly settled on a pretty small upper limit on how much arguing they are prepared to do, so he says nothing. Willow searches her mind for examples of non-scary magic she’s been doing to reassure him lately, but it’s been a while since floating pencils was something she needed to practice. She comes up with, “I did that revelation spell with that girl Tara last week. That stopped Kathy without me even having to get close to her. And anyway, the just-in-case spells I’m practicing are only for just in case a demon breaks loose. Which, sensible, when you think about it.”

“What I think about is what if it’s the humans who turn out to be dangerous.”

Willow affects a flippant smile. “Well, that forcefield spell would probably knock a human just as out as a vampire.”

Oz doesn’t look convinced and it hurts in a few different ways, a sort of grab bag of hurt. It hurts that he’s worrying, but it also hurts that maybe he doesn’t trust her to control her magic or judge the people in the Initiative for herself. Willow reminds herself that he doesn’t know them like she does. The idea of a secret military operation is scarier than the reality of Riley’s easy smile or Professor Patel’s coffee mug with its picture of a koala bear. “I’ll be okay, Oz.”

He nods seriously. “You’d better be.” Then with a smile, “I don’t want to have to wolf out on whatever’s down there.”

“You don’t have to wolf out on anything.” Maybe Warren.

“Okay then.” Oz stands up and comes over to her. They don’t fight much but when they do, there’s another unspoken rule that there has to be a proportional amount of cuddling when they’re done.

This ends up with them in bed, on top of the covers but with a throw from the chair draped comfortably over them. Oz is propped up with Willow lying against him. She can feel his breath against her hair. He says, “Oh, if you see Harmony, run.”

“Good rule for life” Willow agrees.

The breeze against her hair increases for a second as Oz chuckles. “No” he says, “I mean, she’s a vampire now. Devon and me ran into her when we were loading the van.”

“Oh.” Willow sobers. Hearing that a classmate has been sired isn’t new but it’s one of those things that doesn’t get easier, even if it is Harmony.

Oz asks, “You okay?”

“Yeah. I’m guessing graduation?”

“She didn’t say. She did mention a boyfriend, so maybe it was him.”

Harmony, dead and still bragging about boyfriends. It’s almost reassuring. Willow says, “We should tell Buffy.”

“I called her already, before you resurfaced.”

Willow nods against him. These days, she spends a lot of time underground, coming back up to find things have happened without her. And with Chris and Warren now working on a project she’s not, going under to find things have been happening without her down there too. She had been hoping that left out feeling went away as you grew up. She sighs and says, “Technically, I should report her to the Initiative. We had a briefing last week: We’re supposed to report any possible sighting we hear about to Alpha team.”

“Will you?”

Willow thinks of Harmony with her made up boyfriends and mean looks and cherry scented lip balm, pacing a white tiled cell. “No.”

*****

Anya doesn’t trouble to knock when she arrives at Giles’ flat and Giles, mid-way through organising his shelves, takes a moment to recover from the surprise of turning to find her there. Into the moment, she says, “They’re not letting me see Xander.”

“Anya. Um. Who – who is they?”

“The army.” Anya makes a gesture, as though she is taking the entire US army in her fist, scrunching them up and tossing them over her shoulder. Entirely possible she has taken down armies, of course. Giles isn’t sure about that, but is sure that the more he reads of the now-woman, the less he likes. Partly not wishing to antagonise her, and partly in deference to her now-human status, he replies civilly. “He does live in barracks, Anya. I imagine you’d need an appointment at the very least.” Giles wonders if he ought to find out. He had assumed that Xander being so near would mean they would see a lot of him, but he’s been taken up with some mysterious training all week and might appreciate a visit. Then again, he might not. Giles doesn’t want to play the part of the embarrassing older relative. Not that he is a relative, of course, and that complicates things too. How would he explain his desire to visit? I’m his former-librarian?

Not to mention, if the Initiative turn out to be less benign than desired, it is better that the children have someone to turn to who is not on their radar.

“It’s not like I have any powers” gripes Anya, “Or guns. Maybe I should get some guns.”

“I think that would be counter productive.” There is a lot of trouble Anya could get into, Giles realises, knowing as little as she does of the ways of modern society. Distantly, it occurs to him that, as the only human aware of her status who is already settled into adult life, it could be him that guides her. But a former vengeance demon is hardly his responsibility.

“I only need to see him to ask where our relationship’s going.” Anya flings herself own on the sofa.

“Please sit down” mutters Giles, “Make yourself at home.”

“I’m doing that.”

Giles makes tea, telling himself he does so because it is easier to humour her with a listening ear, and aware deep down that she is his first visitor all week. He thinks back over the last five days. He’d phoned Robson for a quick catch up, and he’d had a brief conversation with his neighbour about bin day. The girl behind the checkout in Walmart had smiled at him.

Yes, Giles tells himself sarcastically, of course he is just humouring Anya.

Is being sarcastic to oneself a bad sign?

When he carries the tea through to the living room, Anya is flicking through a copy of _Common Demonic Species of the Hellmouth_ with a bored air. She sets the book aside none too gently and reaches for her tea. Giles bats her away. “Anya, in a thousand years, have you not learnt that it needs to brew?”

She shrugs. “I’m more used to stewed Grakyor blood. It hasn’t tasted the same since I was human though.” She eyes the mugs and teapot, the jug of milk and bowl of sugar cubes. Giles wonders, suddenly, if she has gone as long without conversation as him. Who does she speak to nowadays, that a date over two months ago still counts as a relationship?

After a while, Giles judges the tea sufficiently brewed and pours it. Since she is more used to stewed Grakyor blood, he doesn’t ask Anya how she likes hers, but simply gives her what he judges to be a standard amount of milk, not too weak or too strong. Despite the sugar bowl, he decides not to give her sugar; no point in instilling bad habits on a recently human person who probably has a limited idea of dental health. He doesn’t take it himself. His grandmother used to proudly tell him that no-one in the family has since the rationing in World War I. Though Giles distinctly remembers her breaking that rule to initiate him into a lifetime of tea drinking, remembers sipping sweet, milky tea from a plastic cup with two handles while playing with buttons from her sewing box.

Anya sips her tea indifferently and asks, “Does Xander ever mention me?”

“I’m afraid not. Not that I’ve seen all that much of him since he returned.”

“I haven’t seen him at all. I did write to him. But he didn’t write back.”

“Xander never was all that adept at expressing himself on paper.”

“Did he write to you?”

“He sent me a postcard once.” An America flag overlaid with six tiny pictures of young men carrying out inexplicable training exercises. On the back, Xander had written: _Hello G-man. Hope you’re spending your summer drinking tea and reading a trashy novel for a change. I’d love to see Snyder trying to survive here for a day. Look after Buffy and Willow for me. Xander. PS, Sorry about calling you G-man._ “He phoned Buffy and Willow regularly, I believe.”

“See, he never phoned me. He didn’t write to me. Did he mention me in the postcard?”

“I’m sorry, Anya.”

“It’s like he doesn’t value our relationship at all. And yet he took me to prom.”

Keen to steer her from Xander, Giles asks, “What have you been doing since then?”

Anya shrugs. “Living off my savings. Finding out no-one demonic wants to talk to me anymore. Oh, and cooking.”

“Cooking?”

“It turns out the human body needs to feed every single day, three times a day. Who knew that?”

“I had been aware.”

“I do remember a lot of cooking from my last stint as a human, but that was the nine hundreds! You never see human women slaving over carcasses and cooking pots anymore, so I just thought they’d figured out a better way of doing things. Turns out it’s just the same but the carcass comes preprepared.” She gestures to the bookshelf. “You mixed up A.V. Midwinter and A.T Midwinter by the way. If you’re doing it alphabetically.”

“Oh, thank you.” Giles sets his tea aside to correct the error.

Behind him, Anya says, “And you’re going to need to make room for _Peterson’s Index of Demonology_.” She holds it up.

“Oh, good, I’d thought I’d lost that.”

Anya hands it over, then stands a while watching Giles remove a few slim volumes from the second shelf to slide it in. “Why do you have all these boxes of books anyway?”

“They’re from the high school library.”

“Oh.” Anya kneels beside him and helps make room for the books displaced by Peterson’s Index. “I asked Xander to run away with me that night. Before the ascension.”

“It’s a good job he didn’t accept. He was invaluable in the battle.”

“He would have been invaluable keeping me awake to drive.” Anya reaches into the nearest box, plucks out _The Complete Compendium of Creatures of the Night_ by J. Waters. Sets it aside. “One thing I am sure about, I don’t like Xander being mixed up with the army. Not with what they’re doing with the demons lately.”

Giles feigns ignorance. “What they’re doing with the demons?”

“Capturing them. Everyone’s talking about it. One night a vampire at Willy’s won’t serve you because you’re human now, the next night he’s gone and the half N’sloor who works at the docks says he got taken away by these soldiers. And, good, because it’s not like I lost my powers on purpose so why shouldn’t I get served, but soldiers hunting vampires? When did that lead anywhere good?”

“I think it rather depends on your definition of good.”

“And it’s not just vampires. When I was trying to find somewhere safe for a human to shop for Grakyor blood, I heard about all sorts being taken.”

“And the more taken, the fewer left to harm unsuspecting people. Anya, now that you’re human, surely you want humanity to be safe from the demon world?”

Anya considers this, shrugs again. “I’m not sure yet.”

*****

Xander glances at Buffy while Willow goes to get their drinks. They’re in the Bronze for his first night off since AIT bit and he’s not complaining; he likes it more than campus. It’s more homely.

Not loving the reason, though: They are here because there’s minimal chance of running into Parker. Xander would think the guy deserved the sort of ass kicking he’s been trained to never inflict on a civilian, but he wonders if it would be more fitting to just leave him to live his miserable, Buffyless life. The guy had to be irredeemable to have a shot at dating Buffy and do this. He almost wants to tell her so, but, looking at her face, he doesn’t think it would help. Jokes are out too, and he isn’t sure what else to go with. He automatically looks to Willow for help but she is still at the bar, chatting to a blonde girl with a shy smile. Beside him, Buffy sighs heavily. In desperation, Xander decides to talk shop. “I wish I’d been around; I could have had a unit come for him.”

Buffy frowns. “Parker?”

“Spike.”

Buffy brightens a little at this. “Oh, that’d be good. I’m not sure they’d take the whole gem of Amara thing seriously though. From what Willow’s said, they’re not down with the magics, so they might not step in until Spike had the gem and was all impossible to kill.”

“And then it’d be a slayer thing. I hear ya.”

Buffy nods. “Plus, if anyone’s going to lock Spike up and take him apart? I kind of think it should be me. I’ve earned it.”


	6. Fear Itself

Just as he’s getting into the swing of AIT, Xander is given an afternoon to himself on a day when Willow and Buffy both have lectures. He thinks about calling Giles but decides not to bother him. He and Giles alone together usually degenerates into Xander winding Giles up and now that he’s supposed to be Mr Mature Army Guy, he isn’t sure what a conversation just the two of them would look like. Probably more formal than he wants for his afternoon off if it goes well. If it doesn’t go well, then less formal than he wants to be in front of Giles now that he’s Mr Mature Army Guy. Besides Willow’s told him that Giles was pretty busy with the books from the old library last time she saw him. He probably doesn’t want anyone cutting into that.

That leaves his parents but Xander decides he’d rather go to the mall. Or the morgue, but the mall’s closer.

Training has been intense lately, to the point that it feels weird to be back in civvies. Not that Xander minds – on the contrary, he figures he’s pretty lucky to any time off in the midst of it all, let alone this afternoon and then the party tomorrow.

At the food court, Xander sips a milkshake, watches people come and go and flicks through the one training manual he’s allowed to take off base, a run through of how to ready a XM207. The thing is, between Ethan’s magic and there being nowhere near so many different guns as there are different demons, he knows how to use a XM207 backwards (well, not really backwards. That’d be a bad idea) but he still hasn’t learnt which demon species matches which code.

HSTs, or Sub-Ts, not demons. Xander’s screwed that up more than once and got a few of the guys thinking he’s from some weird religious family. He just told them to take the religious out of the description and then he changed the subject just as casually as he could. Lucky for him, the guys are happy to talk about pretty much anything. It’s not like trying to talk to guys at school, where everyone’s out to get you. Not that the guys won’t find a reason to laugh at you but it’s a good natured sort of laugh, and you know they’ll stop before it goes too far. Xander had figured the whole brothers in arms thing was just a cliché from the movies, but with some of the other new recruits it really is like how he imagines having brothers would be. He definitely doesn’t want to send them out prepped for something spikey when they’re after something fiery, which is what could happen if he got a code muddled.

So, demons. HSTs. That’s what he needs to study. Guns, it turns out, are the easy part. But people know that guns exist and are oblivious to demons – to HSTs – so Xander can’t exactly read up on demon code names in the food court of Sunnydale Mall.

Maybe he should have stayed at the base, but there’s only so much testosterone he can take, even if the guys are all cool. It’s good to get away for a bit and wear jeans and have a milkshake, even if it means he has to resort to staring at the XM207 diagrams and trying to remember if those things with three horns are Sub Terrestrial 67119 or 67129. Can’t they just call them horny things? Or not.

Maybe he’s still got a way to go before he’s Mr Mature Army Guy.

“Oh!” says a bright voice as a pair of Styrofoam cups land in front of him, “I went to a conference with the man who invented that thing.” Anya sits down across from him and continues, “Or at least it could have been him. He definitely invented a lot of big guns, pictures of them everywhere. I was there to curse this other inventor who was sleeping with his secretary. He’s in a demon dimension now.”

“Anya, hi. Please, sit down.”

Anya looks confused. “I already did.”

“Sending people to demon dimensions, huh? Good to know your stories haven’t changed.”

She brightens. “You like my stories?”

Great holy Santa, no. But the idea makes her so happy that Xander doesn’t outright say it. “Well, it’s just – and you got to bear in mind that I’m a guy – I don’t really feel comfortable hearing about how you sent guys to demon dimensions.”

“Oh, he wasn’t a guy when I sent him, he was a demon. So he probably felt right at home.” Anya takes a sip of her coffee and pulls a face. “So why have you been avoiding me?”

“Avoiding you? I didn’t even know you were back in town!”

“Well, I am. I don’t know anyone outside of Sunnydale so I came back when the ascension was a dud.”

“Well, you missed a good showdown. So…what are you up to these days?” It crosses Xander’s mind that she might tell him she’s trying to get her powers back. He so wouldn’t want to hear that and have to turn her in, but also, it would be better for some guy somewhere and his secretary if he did. Or at least, if he talked her out of it somehow. He doesn’t want to have to turn her in. Probably just him being soft because she’s the only girl who ever asked him out.

Fortunately, Anya just shrugs and says, “Not much.” She reaches across the table, picks up his milkshake and sips from it. “I’ve missed you.”

“Hey, that’s my – Wait, missed me? Missed me as one of the people you know, right?”

“Right. Also, it’s been very confusing not knowing where our relationship’s going.”

“Our rela…um. Anya, what, ah. What makes you think we’re in a relationship?”

“We went to prom together. Remember?”

“Vividly.”

Anya looks a little concerned but asks, “So…Where is our relationship going?”

What the hellmouth made her think they had a relationship? Xander thinks back over the hurried farewell before she left town. It’s all a bit of a blur on account of them both assuming he was about to die horribly.

Then, out of no-where, he thinks of Parker. Buffy’s still hung up on the creep. Xander doesn’t want to be anything like him, doesn’t want to give anyone a wrong impression, even if it is awkward to actually look someone in the eye and say, “Look, I’m sorry. I’m right in the middle of my AIT. I barely have time to shower let alone date someone.”

Anya frowns. “AIT?”

“Advanced Individual Training.”

“Oh, right. The army.”

“Yeah.”

“So you’d date me if you weren’t in the army?”

“Probably” says Xander, to soothe her feelings, and then he realises it’s true. She is gorgeous after all, and he’s a flattered by her attention as only a guy who screwed up the one real relationship he ever had can be. And there’s the aforementioned only-girl-to-ask-him-out status. The only other girls to show any interest were, in Cordelia’s case, embarrassed enough to swear him to secrecy at first, in Willow’s case, already taken and therefore bringing a whole load of wrongness to the mix, and, in Faith’s case, psychotic. Anya just walked up to him and asked him out. It was a novelty. He liked it.

Anya is quiet for a while, considering, before pointing out, “Plenty of people date while they’re in the army. All the way through the Napoleonic Wars I was being summoned to deal with soldiers who were laying with camp followers and prostitutes.”

“Well, doesn’t that just show that us dating while I’m in the army is a bad idea?”

“Oh, you’re saying you’d sleep with prostitutes if we dated!”

“No! No, that’s not what I meant. Lots of people date in the army. But what I mean is, I’m still doing training, and it’s intense. I don’t have time to date.”

“Well, I could help you with the training. I know a lot about war. I started three.”

“Okay, a world of yikes. But you helping me with training wouldn’t really be a relationship. Look, can I have my milkshake back?” Xander reaches over and takes the cup from her hand. It’s empty.

Anya frowns suddenly. “Wait, you say you’re busy and here you are drinking milkshake!”

Xander holds up the manual. “And learning about guns. And anyway, this is a rare case of time off base for me. I get a few hours today, and a party with the guys tomorrow night, and that’s it for I don’t know how long.”

“There’s a party?”

“I’m sure you could come.” That she could use some company is painfully obvious.

Except perhaps to her. “Why would I do that if we’re not dating?”

“Well, the scoobies are people you know aren’t they? Didn’t you come back here because there are people you know here?”

“I guess. This is a dangerous town to be in if you’re human and no-one’s looking out for you.” Anya’s puzzled frown stays in place. “The scoobies?”  
“Buffy and everyone. It’s from a TV show. So, should I tell them you’re going?”

“I guess.”

“Great. Oh, you’ll need a scary costume by the way.”

*****

Whatever Willow had imagined when she pictured working for the Initiative, it sure wasn’t this. But Professor Patel asked her to come in tonight as a special favour because someone needed covering, so here she is doing what is really, really not lab work or computer stuff. Well, maybe lab work, because she’s in a lab. And there is a computer, because MRI scanners don’t work without them, but Willow is more focused on the vampire inside the machine.

It’s the girl vampire, the one she saw her first day here. She’s not throwing herself at any barriers now, just lying unconscious inside the machine, making no trouble.

Well, that’s kind of the point. All sorts of trouble a vampire could make on the surface, but here she is not able to hurt anyone. Willow makes herself think about how many people the vampire might have drained by now if she hadn’t been captured. She doesn’t know because she doesn’t know when she was captured, but some. It’s hard to believe with the vampire all drugged and docile and just laying there, but some. Some is worth it. It might even have been people Willow knows, Oz or Buffy or Tara, maybe. Well, not Buffy – even when she was fighting back, this vampire didn’t seem like she stood a chance against the Slayer – but Oz or Tara. Oz out late with his band or Tara wandering along at night, maybe not even in the know about demons. Willow should check that. On one hand, Tara’s a witch so maybe she knows all about demons, but on the other hand, what if she doesn’t? More than ever, with a vampire being given a brain scan by people who haven’t mentioned magic once, demons and magic seem like separate things. Willow doesn’t actually know what the brain scans are for. She had asked but the answer was a whole lot of vague. Sometimes it’s like they forget the scientists aren’t soldiers. The soldiers don’t have time to stand around asking questions but when you’re here for the science, standing around asking questions is pretty much the point. But it seems like the questions have to be what and how not why. How does a vampire’s brain work, not why would we want to know.

Not that it’s not interesting. Back when Angel was around, Willow thought a lot about souls but not so much about minds. There’s no denying that seeing the physical changes the demon works on the brain is fascinating. The overdeveloped amygdala doesn’t look different to a human brain to the naked eye, but they are using more than the naked eye, and it’s there. Other regions, too, are subtly different, the parts associated with sensory processing slightly denser than that same part of a human brain, the parts associated with impulse control slightly smaller.

“Of course” the guy working the machine, Seth, tells her, “This can only show us so much. A lot of data will have to come from conscious specimens.”

Willow can’t tell if he’s trying to impress her or just being careless. Though really, it’s the same thing, since he knows she’s just here to help with the scans and isn’t cleared to know whatever the project’s end game is. She thought that was weird at first, because there’s a chance she’ll work it out but when she’d pointed this out, Professor Patel had only laughed and said, “Not unless you’ve got a very active imagination.”

The thing is, Willow does. She hadn’t said that, but Professor Patel had elaborated anyway, saying it was all covered by the contract she had signed. “The only difference is that because this is a classified project, you won’t talk about it to people within the Initiative either.”

So, a classified project within a classified project. That has to make it the sort of thing Buffy might need to know about, but Willow doesn’t want to be too obvious about it. She considers before asking, lightly, “You mean like pictures and stuff?”

“That’s it” says Seth, “Show ’em photos of humans, photos of other Sub-Ts, see if the way they process the image varies.”

Willow wants to ask what happens if they screw their eyes shut, but she has a horrible feeling she knows.

She doesn’t regret not reporting Harmony. At least, she doesn’t when she doesn’t think about who Harmony might be eating now. And anyway, there’s Buffy for that.

She asks, “What about sounds? Human voices, HST noises, that sort of thing.”

“Oh, we’ll do that too.” Was Seth just not listening when Professor Patel told him Willow isn’t cleared for the project? Willow is torn between pushing her luck and playing it safe. Decides to push, because why shouldn’t she know about a classified project? Warren and Chris are in on at least one. And if she’s caught asking, she can say she assumed it was okay because Seth was telling. She opens her mouth but pauses, shuts it again. What if this is a test and Professor Patel asked Seth to be all loose lipped? Being let in on the classified projects might depend on not asking questions now.

So just in case, Willow works quietly. Very quietly in fact: If she’s wrong and there’s no test, just being quiet and not engaging too much might prompt Seth to try harder to impress her, make him want to fill her silence. It doesn’t work. The conversation drifts to mundane things then fizzles out altogether.

Makes sense really. Mysterious silence never worked in high school. Not that she’s into Seth. He couldn’t hold a candle to Oz.

Or Buffy or Tara.

Willow blinks, pushes the thought away. What is it with her lately? First Buffy pops up when she’s with Oz, now she can’t get Tara out her head.

Is it because they’re both blond? Would it help if she got Oz to dye his hair?

She knows it wouldn’t help.

Now that her thoughts have gone down this path, it’s a relief that Seth doesn’t talk much for the rest of her shift. They collate the images and slide the unconscious vampire out of the scanner. Graham and another guy turn up and check the restraints before wheeling her away. Having two of them seems unnecessary since the vampire is still knocked out, but Willow reminds herself that they have to be in a pair to enter the holding area. Besides, vampire strength is kind of normalised for her but the Initiative are right not to take chances with it. Not everyone is Buffy. Also, given how little they know about demon anatomy, there is always a chance she’ll wake up before they reach her cell. Last week, Willow was given a lot of data about anaesthesia to feed into the new computer models. It seemed the Initiative had spent the weekend anesthetising vampires and a few other HSTs just to see how long they could keep them down. There were enough vampires that they have a reasonable idea now of what it takes to knock them out, but it’s still not a complete picture. With most other demon species, it’s still pure guess work.

The scans done, Willow signs out, which takes a while. She sees soldiers come and go through the elevator like this is just another room in their frat house, but everyone involved in the science work has to go through a series of checks before they can resurface. It’s partly that they went through a more intense vetting process before they even arrived, Willow supposes. Not to mention (because no-one does mention it) the scientists are potentially up close and personal with the HSTs more, so are more likely to be contaminated if they get something down here that’s capable of contaminating. It’s not a nice thought.

When she finally reaches the elevator, she finds Chris already pressing the button. He jumps a little when Willow arrives, like he was lost in thought. Not a good thought, if his shaken expression is anything to go by. As they get in the elevator and begin their ascent, Willow almost asks about the project and stops herself. Not smart to do it in the elevator, with its in-built voice recognition tech. Instead she asks, “How’re things?”

Chris nods in an odd sort of way, a way that moves his shoulders as well as just his head. “Okay.” He doesn’t make an okay face. He makes an I-want-to-tell-you-but-I-can’t face, so once they’re out the elevator, out the frat house and into the night time campus, Willow pretends like she needs to head the way he’s heading. He heads off campus. She remembers that he’s still living with his mom, so it makes sense he’s heading for town. If he asks, she can always say she’s going to catch the last part of the Dingo’s gig at the Bronze.

It must be scary, walking this way in the dark right after finding out that monsters are real. She says, “It can get pretty intense down there.”

Chris twitches a smile. “Yeah.”

Willow checks no-one is close by before adding, “I got to use an MRI scanner though. That was pretty cool.”

“I guess it would be.” The smile is gone.

“Okay, Chris, are you going to make me outright ask if you’re okay?”

“I’m okay, Willow.”

“You look all angsty.”

That twitchy smile again and Chris actually make eye contact for a solid half second before dropping his gaze to the ground. “I’m not allowed to talk about it.”

Willow sets the double agent thing aside, because, “If this is the classified project, they can’t stop you talking to anyone about it. If you can’t talk to me, what about someone else on the team?”

Chris frowns. “Warren?”

“Or literally anyone else.”

“He’s not too bad. I already talked to him a bit.” Chris shakes his head. “But I’m not sure he got it. I don’t think anyone else on the project would either.”

Willow sets aside the _Warren’s not that bad_ comment. It’s not like Chris has a history of being a great judge of character. “Professor Walsh maybe? I mean, I know she’s on in on the classified project, but in a hands off kind of way.”

“No, she’s hands on.”

“Oh.” Willow had just assumed from how busy Professor Walsh seems to be that she wouldn’t have time to get involved with whatever Chris and Warren are working on too. That means they are getting more time with her, and she’s supposed to be mentoring all of them. “Well, you could still talk to her. You know, if you have any questions or concerns.”

“I’m way past questions and concerns.”

“Then what?” but as Willow asks, she knows. Chris is scared.

“I can’t really say.”

“Hey, Chris, if the classified project isn’t for you, you could always ask them to move you back to lab work.” When Chris doesn’t answer, Willow adds, “Don’t go thinking it would affect your scholarship. They’d respect you for speaking up and they’ve got to know you’ll be more useful doing something you’re actually into.”

Chris just gives her a distracted look, like the scholarship is the last thing on his mind. Willow tries a different approach, telling him, “The research we’re doing, it could really help people.” She only says it to comfort Chris, but as soon as she’s said it, she realises that if he contradicts her, that tells her something about this classified project.

“Right” he says without inflection.

“So…” Willow smiles encouragingly. “That’s a happy, right? We’re doing good work.”  
“I’m not sure good’s the word for it.”

“What have you seen?” The words are out of Willow’s mouth before she can plan them. Not exactly secret agenty.

Chris stops walking and sort of half turns to her, looks at her, looks at the ground. “I don’t think I can tell you. Look, Willow – Your parents can afford to send you to college anywhere, right? I mean, you applied to Oxford.” He meets Willow’s eyes again, but she isn’t sure where he’s going with this, so she just ends up staring back. Chris goes on, “Maybe you should think about transferring, moving somewhere else. Somewhere abroad, maybe. It might be better that way.”

“Better why? Chris, tell me what’s wrong.”

“I’ve got to go.” Chris turns and walks rapidly away.

*****

Willow’s still thinking about it the next day when Oz gets back from helping Devon clear up the last of their set. “How’d it go?” she asks.

“About how it usually does. Same songs and everything.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be there.”

Oz gives her a fond expression. “It’s okay. You don’t have to be at every venue we play.”

“I like to be.”

“What did you get up to instead?” asks Oz, “How was the secret agenting?”

“Oh, same old. We did MRI scans on a vampire.”

“Why?”

“Fun and hijinks.” When Oz doesn’t smile, Willow adds, “I’m still working on the why.”  
Oz smiles then. “Good. But –” He breaks off as the phone rings, answers it in his usual brief way. Sometimes Willow wonders if the charm of his reserve will wear off as he ages but she’s concluded it won’t. He’ll be sophisticated and taciturn.

Into the phone, Oz says, “Hey, Xander.” Willow looks up, expecting the phone to be handed over, but Oz keeps hold of it. After a pause, he says, “Sure that’s no problem. You told her to wear a scary costume, right?”

When Oz puts the phone down, he tells Willow, “Anya’s coming to the Halloween party.”

“Why?”

Oz smiles. “So now you ask why.”

Willow pouts. “You’re not as scary as the Initiative. So why’s Anya want to hang out with us?”

“He didn’t say. Just that he invited her and was that okay. So I said it’s no problem.”

“I heard that part.”

“It isn’t a problem, right?”

“I guess not.” Willow isn’t sure what she thinks about a former demon muscling in on her time with her friends. Sure, Anya is human now, but hardly by choice, and she did bring forth vampire Willow into this world. Willow still thinks about that. Soft hands tracing her body, and part of her mind going _oh, I get it now_ while the rest of her squirmed. And then there had been the drama at the Bronze, still curtesy of Anya, who had had zero problem with those vampires slaughtering people. She’d even had Oz thinking Willow was dead thanks to the two Willows situation.

Then again, she did that with magic. Being a thousand years old, she’s got to know a lot about magic. Willow decides that if she has to spend an evening with Anya, that’s what she’ll talk to her about.

“Hey” says Oz, sitting down beside her, “You realise you called them scary just then?”

“What?”

“The Initiative. You said I’m not as scary as them.”

“Well, that’s not a them being scary situation, that’s a you not being scary situation.”

“You’re still being careful, right?”

“I am.”  
“Good. Because forget about the why if it endangers the Willow.”  
Willow smiles, standing up. “I’m being careful, Oz. And anyway, I’m still practicing the protection spells.”

“The same spells you said were for the demons.”  
“I also said they’d work on humans too.”

“You mustn’t rely on it too much though. I mean, what if they do know about magic? They could have some way to deflect a protection spell.”  
“I’d be surprised.”  
“And when you’re up against the army, surprised is what you’re hoping for?”

“Oz, I’ll be alright. And they really don’t know anything about magic. They act like demons are just animals. So magic? More than enough to keep me safe if I add a healthy dose of being careful.” Willow looks herself over in the mirror, wondering if this pagan themed top is too obvious for her first time in wicca group. What should an accomplished witch with an open mind wear that makes it look like she didn’t consider the question?

“I don’t like you being down there without back up” says Oz.

“I have back up up here. You guys all know where I am. Anyway, once Xander’s done the barracks and book learning part of his AIT, he’ll be down there sometimes too.”

Oz doesn’t look all that reassured. Willow supposes he is well aware that Xander with a gun isn’t as likely to win against the entire Initiative as Willow with a spell and he’s already worried that’s not enough. But, much as some of what goes on in the facility is a little worrisome, the idea of anyone there outright attacking her is laughable.

Unless they find out that she’s told her friends about the project, of course. She’d be arrested then.

Seeing her worry still echoed in Oz’s face, Willow says, “Oz, most of the scientists are just nice, geeky people who want to know more about how the supernatural works. And most of the soldiers are okay. Riley’s hardly going to hurt me, or Graham.”

“I guess.” Oz doesn’t sound convinced. Willow glances at the clock and decides she doesn’t have time to agonise over her top. Pulling her coat on, she asks, “Did you know Chris back in school?”

“Not much. Why?”

“Just that if you did I wondered if you could talk to him, try to work out how he’s doing. Obviously without telling him you know about the Initiative.”

“You probably know him better than me by now.” Oz frowns. “I guess he’s not doing okay for you to ask.”

“He’s freaking. But I don’t know if that’s because of something he’s seen or if he’s just reacting to the whole yikes-monsters-are-real thing. I guess I figured if you knew him you might be able to tell if he’s got a specific fear or just a whole-new-world-view type of crisis.”

“Huh.”

It makes sense that Oz doesn’t know Chris, Willow supposes. Oz knows an overwhelming amount of people, but they all tend to be flashy, noisy, popular people like Devon. She is probably the most introverted person in his life. “I’ll see you later, okay?”

“Wicca group?” Oz guesses.

“That’s right. And don’t tell me to be careful with that too, because I already had that from Buffy.”

“I was going to tell you to have fun.”

Willow smiles guiltily. “Sorry. Oh, hey, if the party’s a free for all, can I invite Tara?”

“Sure. The more the spookier.”

*****

Wicca group turns out to be a total dud but at least there’s Tara to talk to. They end up forming their own little bubble, speaking mostly amongst themselves. In a way, it reminds Willow of when she first started hanging out with Buffy, that sense of having a new close friend, fragile and perfect like a butterfly in her soul. Except that this is even better in a way, because she has so much in common with Tara. With Buffy, it had been exciting just to find someone who wasn’t Xander or Jesse who wanted to spend time with her. With Tara, it’s like out of all the new people Willow’s so much as walked past on campus, Tara is the one she’d rather be talking with. When Tara hears about the party, she doesn’t say yes right away. She says, “Oh, oh I’m not much of a party animal.”

“Me neither” says Willow, “You can keep me company.” Does that sound a bit needy, she wonders, and then she tells herself to get a grip: It’s not like she’s asking Tara on a date, after all. “It’ll be fun. A group of us are going. Well, by group, I mean Buffy, our friend Xander, this random girl Anya he invited and my boyfriend Oz.”

Tara’s expression falters very slightly for some reason, but she just adds, “And you.”

“And me. But you can talk to me at wicca group.” Willow glances around to make sure the other members can’t hear and adds, “Or not.”

Tara giggles. “W-we do seem to be the only actual witches here.”

“So, do you want to be an actual witch at a Halloween party?”

Tara nods shyly. “Sure.”

“Great!” Willow beams, then worries she’s coming on too strong. “You’ll need to wear something scary.”

*****

They arrive at the party sans-Anya. They did wait for her, but she was late. Willow, who suggested they just let her catch up, hopes she won’t get blamed if Anya catches up upset. “She’s an ex-demon” she tells Tara, as they approach the frat house, partly to gauge how Tara reacts to the idea of demons.

“Key word being ex” adds Xander, “She’s fine now, just…confused.”

“Yeah” says Willow, noting that Tara looks a little alarmed, “She’s harmless now. I’m just thinking in case she ever got her powers back.”

Xander shrugs. He hasn’t had time to get a costume together, but is toting a toy gun Oz found for him and a cowboy hat borrowed from one of the guys at the barracks. “I’m almost a cowboy” he’d declared earlier, “It’s the best I could do with zero time to shop.” Now he says, “She didn’t mention anything about getting her powers back. I figure she lost that chance back when she teamed up with vampire you.”

“There was a vampire version of me” Willow explains to Tara, “Anya was at school with us for like five minutes in between being a demon and now. Xander took her to prom.” A thought occurring, she looks round at Xander. “That’s not why you invited her, is it?”

Xander looks all awkward. “Well, kind of. I just thought if she can hang out with all of us a group it will move her back into the friend zone.”

“You don’t think talking to her will do that?”

“I’ll have you know I bravely went where no man’s been before and told the ex vengeance demon that I don’t have time for a girlfriend, but I’m not sure she really took it in.”

Willow isn’t sure being told no and then asked to a party isn’t somewhat mixed signally. Also, is Xander saying he’d date Anya if he didn’t have AIT to focus on? She gives him a disapproving look but he’s busy adjusting his hat and doesn’t notice.

What would Anya’s costume even be, Willow wonders. Maybe she will turn up and she won’t have one. Or maybe she’s late because she’s trying to put together a copy of something truly horrific she saw or made at some point in the last thousand years.

Tara has come as Medusa. She has her hair up, with snakes painted down her neck and the sides of her face. A little sand filled snake adorns one shoulder. If you look closely (which Willow has) you can see that her stud earrings are actually tiny, coiled snakes. She has painted eyes on her eyelids, so that when she blinks, it looks like something evil is flashing in the depths of her mind.

When Tara lowers her face, the snakes all flex and the painted eyes stare blankly out. She seems a little sad for the briefest of moments. No-one else sees it, but Willow does.

“Huh” says Oz as they arrive in the house.

“I guess we’re early” says Buffy, looking around the empty hallway.

Willow feels a little guilty about leaving Anya behind too soon. She might not want Anya hanging out with her friends but she also doesn’t want to be mean about it, or to look mean in front of Tara. “Maybe they’re all hiding upstairs waiting to scare us.” As she says it, she realises that’s probably what’s happening. On Halloween, it’s actually more likely than it being something actually supernatural, even if alarm bells are going off in the back of her mind. When you live your whole life in Sunnydale, alarm bells are primed to go off even if nothing’s actually wrong.

Of course, it turns out something is wrong. Wrong in a rubber bats turning real, tarantulas on their shoulders, big scare fest kind of way. It’s nowhere near as bad as some of the things they’ve faced, but they weren’t expecting it, and Tara being there adds another layer of fear. She may be a witch, she may even know about demons, but it’s unlikely she’s been in this sort of danger before and they’re the ones who brought her here. Willow’s the one who brought her here.

So, knowing she has to put things right, Willow suggests a supplication to Aradia. She doesn’t tell them that she’s been practising it alongside the protection spells on the grounds that the Initiative facility is a maze even without the restricted parts she’s never been given a tour of. If she ever had to get out of there in a hurry – if, say, the Initiative found out she’s breaking Title 18 – a direct line to the Goddess of the Lost wouldn’t go amiss.

Buffy isn’t keen, which is just typical. If doing a spell to get out of here had been Buffy’s idea, Willow would be expected to jump to it. But it’s Willow’s idea, so that makes it a sign that she’s being reckless with the dangerous magics as if they’re not all in danger by staying here. An actually haunted haunted house isn’t the time to get into that but the anger doesn’t get the memo, so Willow finds herself yelling at Buffy and stomping off. She doesn’t mean to. It just happens. It’s humiliating because acting like a stroppy toddler is the last thing this situation needs. What makes it worse is Oz and Tara both follow her, so she’s put them in even worse danger than they were in.

When Willow comes to a stop, Tara says, “I don’t think y-you meant to do that, did you?”

“No” replies Willow gratefully. Tara is right – she didn’t mean to, it’s the influence of the house. Oh, but that makes it more dangerous, so she shouldn’t be grateful at all. “We need to get out of here.”

“Yeah” says Oz, “And find Buffy.”

Tara says, “You want to call on Aradia? Maybe she can guide us to an exit but help us find Buffy first.”

“Right.” Willow nods.

“We could find Buffy now” says Oz, “She’s only back this wa –” and then he stops. Willow sees how their surroundings have shifted, the way back to Buffy clearly going somewhere else now, so she says, “We’ll ask Aradia.”

Beside her, Tara gasps. Willow follows her gaze and realises Oz wasn’t looking at the altered surroundings at all. He is stood statue-still, his eyes black, his face sprouting fur. “Oh, goddess.”

Tara takes a step back and Willow automatically steps in front of her, shielding her from Oz. “Oz?”

“What’s h-happening to him?”

“He’s a werewolf. Oz, we need to –” Oz is backing off, and Willow instinctively reaches for him. Yelps when he bats her away, scratching her in the process. Then he’s gone, running away from them, and he doesn’t come back though Willow calls again and again.

Tara puts an arm around her, guides her to a sheltered little niche in the wall. “It’s-it’s the house. It’s playing on everyone’s fears.”

Willow nods through her tears. “He’s always scared he’ll hurt someone when he’s the wolf.” _And I’m scared of losing him_ , she doesn’t add. “And Buffy…Buffy’s scared of being alone. She’s scared being the Slayer will mean she’s alone.” Oh goddess, and now she’s alone because Willow stormed off. Willow feels herself tearing up again but Tara puts a hand on her shoulder and says, “They’ll be okay. We’ll f-find a way out of here and get help.”

“Right.” Willow nods again, thinking over their options. “We just need to do the spell and – Tara?”

Tara freezes up like Oz did, and follows Willow’s gaze to the scales on her hands. “Oh no” she whispers, lifting her hand, “Oh, please, not this!”

“Not what? Tara, what are you scared of?”

“Willow, you have to get out of here! I’m dangerous!”

“Dangerous how?” Willow grips Tara’s hand desperately as the scales ripple up her arm and across one side of her face. One eye morphs, the painted eyelid glinting as it replaces the real thing. “Tara, what are –” Willow stops herself from asking, _what are you_. Settles on repeating, “What are you scared of?”

A tear escapes Tara’s newly demonic eye. It’s not like a human tear. It’s pink. Like blood, Willow supposes, but not really. Pearly, and almost pretty. Willow wipes it gently away before she knows what she’s doing.

“Me” Tara whispers, “I’m scared of me.”

“What? Why?”

“Look at me!” Tara snaps, sharp-toothed, and for a moment it’s scary. But she is more hurt than dangerous and, though Willow gets a brief urge to run, she stays where she is, clutching Tara’s hand. “Hey, Tara, did you see my boyfriend the werewolf back there? Supernatural creatures aren’t exactly a revelation here.”

Tara, busy trying to cover her scaly face with her free hand, gives Willow a startled glance. Willow forces herself to ask, “What are you?”

For a moment, it seems like Tara won’t answer, but then she whispers, “I’m part demon.” She takes a shuddering breath. “I’m s-so sorry, Willow, I should have told you. You h-had a right to decide for yourself if you wanted to risk spending time with me.”

“I’d have risked it” says Willow, without hesitation. “So…what’s the deal? Do you turn like this at certain times? Or if you’re feeling strong emotion or something?”  
Tara shakes her head. “I’ve never been like this before. I’m just always scared I might be one day if I don’t…” she sobs.

“If you don’t what?”

“If I don’t control it. If I don’t pray, and focus on being human.”

If it was as easy as focusing on being human, Willow thinks, Oz would be free to get on with his life every full moon. But there’s no time to get into that now.

Tara adds, “And now I’ve failed and I’m damned! I’m damned, and you’ll be damned too if you stay here.”

“Tara, that’s the house speaking. It’s manifesting your fear, remember? And I’m not going anywhere.”

“B-but you will! I know no-one will want to be around me now. That’s one of the fears.”

Willow gets that, gets that that is why she was briefly tempted to run. But Tara’s fear of being alone is at war with her fear of someone staying and being outcast alongside her for their kindness. The two fears tug at each other, and being alone is never a clear enough fear that the house can manipulate Willow into running.

And Willow is also scared of staying. She’s scared of wanting to stay, scared of how compelling she finds Tara, even like this. “I’m staying.” Willow takes Tara’s free hand and peels it away from her face. “I’m staying and we’re casting this spell together, okay?”

*****

“Well” says Buffy to Xander, as Willow storms off and the others follow, “Looks like it’s just you and me in Camp Sane.”

She doesn’t mean it, obviously. They’ll have to go find the others. Buffy would never let anything happen to Willow and it’s not like Willow can’t handle herself, but his best friend not being here to be protected has Xander freaked out all the same.

Or maybe it’s just the atmosphere here. Between disembodied screams and the front door they just came through suddenly being nowhere in sight, Xander is so ready to get out of here. Also, is it him, or is the place a little like his grandma’s?

This is such a bad time for them all to split up, and Willow’s done just that, running off into danger just like she does every time she goes down into the Initiative’s labs. It’s one thing for him to take risks, but Willow’s special. Willow has a future beyond Sunnydale, which is more than he has. Even joining the army didn’t get him out of this town.

“Xander?” Buffy is looking at him in some concern. Which, no wonder, because he’s supposed to be Mr Mature Army Guy, and here he is with his palms sweating. When did his palms start sweating? “I’m alright.”

“You sure?” asks Buffy, “Because you looked all panicky on me just then.”

He is breathing too fast too, Xander notices distantly. Forget Mr Mature Army Guy, he can’t even pull off Mr Not Completely Pathetic right now.

Perhaps it’s because they are trapped. No-one likes being trapped, right? Trapped in the dark with no clear way out and ye gods, is this how Jesse had felt?

Buffy reaches for him and Xander is yelling, “Buffy, look out!” before he even processes what he’s seeing behind her.

A knife wielding skeleton was never up there on his list of things to see, but it’s hardly the worst thing he’s seen either. He should be able to help. He knows he should. But he finds himself frozen to the spot as Buffy fights the thing, completely unable to remember any of his hand to hand combat training.

The thing turns back into a decoration pretty quickly. Buffy stares down at it, and then at him. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah” Xander forces out, “Sorry, I just – sorry.” Oh, yeah, he’s a real hero. He’s sure got what it takes.

Great and now his inner voice is being sarcastic at him. His dad is right: He’s a loser, too scared to take anything seriously. Come to think of it, it had been grandma’s house where his dad first said that to him. Grandma’s house right after she died, right before mom started drinking more than ever.

Buffy’s still staring at him. She must be disgusted with him, and Xander can hardly blame her when she opts him out of any chance to prove he is remotely capable when she says, “Wait here a moment. I’m going to find Willow.”

She’s gone before he can reply. He is alone.

*****

The spell doesn’t go to plan. Willow isn’t sure whether it’s her fear of not being the witch she thinks she is or Tara’s fear of doing magic while she’s all demonfied, but what should be a simple guidance spell gets completely out of control. For a while it’s terrifying and then suddenly Oz is there, looking his normal wolf-free self. Buffy is there too, and Xander, looking shaky but relieved to see her. Great as it is to be all back together, they are all back together pretty much exactly where whatever dark magic this house is infected with wanted them to be. An ominous voice starts demanding relief and things look pretty dire for a moment before Giles turns up with a chainsaw. Anya’s with him. It turns out, scary for vengeance demons equals bunnies. She skirts around Giles, all ready to throw herself at Xander, but he steps closer to Willow before she moves in, and she pauses. Willow can’t help but feel a little sorry for her. She knows what it’s like to be the girl Xander isn’t dating.

She is, she realises, standing closer to Tara and Xander than the guy she is actually dating. She moves closer to Oz.

Meanwhile, Giles is giving Buffy the intel on the Fear Demon Gachnar who’s infected the house, Buffy is accidently releasing it and it turns out it’s teeny anyway.

They all retreat to Giles’, except for Xander and Tara, who excuse themselves and go their separate ways. “Is she okay?” asks Buffy as Tara retreats, “I’m guessing she’s not used to demons.”

Willow almost tells her and doesn’t. Telling Tara about Buffy’s supernatural side had happened automatically, but telling Buffy Tara’s secret, not so much.

As for telling the Initiative, there’s just no way. Willow isn’t sure they even know about humans with demon DNA, and isn’t sure what they’d do if they did. Besides, Tara is clearly harmless. There’s no question she has a soul. She tells Buffy, “I’ll check on her in the morning.”

*****

Tara seems surprised to see Willow outside her dorm room the following morning. She lets her in and says she fine in a way that would be convincing if it looked like she’d slept.

“You did get the part about me dating a werewolf, right?” asks Willow, “It’s not like I’m anti-demon if they’re…” She trails off, because _good demons_ seems a silly thing to say. Too obvious and somehow too simplistic as well. Also not something she’s really experienced before. “Not dangerous” she finishes.

“But-but I am.” Tara brushes a strand of hair from her scale-free face and studies the carpet.

Willow frowns. “What type of demon is it?” she asks.

“I, I don’t know. But m-my family are always really keen for me to keep it suppressed, so it must be pretty bad.”  
Willow can’t shift her frown. She asks, “Wouldn’t knowing what type it is help with the suppression?”

From the look on Tara’s face, you’d think she’d suggested embracing the dark arts or something. But Tara only says, “I d-don’t think so. It could make it harder, I think. Or my mom would have told me more.” She gives an awkward shrug. “It’s on her side.”

“Well, maybe that’s not why she didn’t tell you. Could you ask her?”

Tara shakes her head. “She died, three years ago.”

“Oh, god, Tara, I’m sorry.”

“It’s…it’s o – You didn’t know.”

Willow sort of wants to hug her. Willow’s mom is a lot to deal with, and Willow can’t imagine not having her to deal with before her hair is grey. Tara has obviously been through so much, and here’s Willow with both her parents just across town if needs them. It makes her feel kind of small, besides this strong, beautiful witch. She says, “Well, if you ever do want to find out more, I can help. I know a bit about demons. Perk of being friends with the Slayer.”  
Tara’s face clouds. “You didn’t s-say anything to Buffy?”

“No. Not that she’d ever hurt you. I mean, you’re you. I mean, you’re obviously not about to get rampagey and you’ve got a soul and all.”

Tara looks down again. “I hope I have.”

“I know you have.”

Tara looks up again with a little smile. “Thank you. I thought if anyone knew, they’d want nothing to do with me.”

“I don’t scare that easy. So you’ll let me know if you ever want to find out more? We could do a spell maybe.”

“I-I don’t know. I don’t think I’m ready for that.”

“Okay. But. Well, what happened in the house, I swear my spells usually turn out better than that.”

“I know” says Tara quickly, “That was just the house. I-I just mean I’m not ready to know about my demon side. I didn’t mean I don’t want to do magic with you, because that would be…” She trails off, smiles.

“Nice?” suggests Willow. She thinks it might be way better than nice but nice is a start.

It seems like Tara gets this because her smile broadens. “Nice” she agrees.

*****

It’s only as Willow is heading over to the facility for her morning shift that she realises some practitioners would view what she just agreed with Tara as a sort of cheating. Doing magic with Tara won’t be doing magic for a specific, demon-fighting related purpose, it will be exploring magic for its own sake. Exploring magic with someone else can get all kinds of personal. Melding of minds, binding of souls, bodies in tune sort of personal. At least, potentially it can.

Maybe she should talk to Oz. Of course, Oz wouldn’t see magic as cheating because Oz doesn’t get magic the way Willow does. But then, because he doesn’t, isn’t it her responsibility to make it really clear for him?

She thinks of last year and her kisses with Xander. Yes, she’ll have to talk to Oz. No way is she risking going down the cheating path again.

Kissing Xander had been a lot like kissing Oz, in that she was kissing someone she loved but the kisses felt off-kilter sometimes. Like she was looking for something and not finding it.

Will it be possible for her to try and explain the personal side of magic to Oz without getting into all that?

“Hey, Will, are you still freaked from last night or just having too many thoughts again?”

Xander is in front of her, clearly about to make his way into the frat house and to the hidden elevator. Willow forces a smile. “Hi, Xander.”

He gives her a serious look. “Too many thoughts, or too much excitement last night?”

“Thoughts. Just, um, thinking about spells and stuff. Not that last night wasn’t freaky.”

Xander sighs. “Yeah, and then some.” He glances at her. “Did Buffy tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“About my complete lack of macho.”

“Xander, don’t tell me you think that was you. That was Gachnar manifesting your fear. You were scared you’d get…well scared.”

Xander tries a smile. “The only thing I fear is fear itself?”

“Exactly. Which makes you very brave when you think about it.”

“Or, it makes me a guy who knows he could screw up. I mean, I must have feared it for a reason.”

“I think you’ll find the reason is guys tend to beat themselves up about how manly they need to be.”

Xander holds the door open for her. “Except, I do need to be manly. Trying to be a manly soldier, here.”

“Being a soldier as in being brave and capable? We both know a certain petite blond who ticks those boxes.” They are not even at the elevator yet, but already it doesn’t seem safe to say Buffy’s name.

Xander nods. “Yeah, Spike could give any soldier a run for his money.”

Willow elbows him. “You know who I’m talking about.”

“I do. And you’ll notice she-who-will-go-unnamed didn’t fall apart like a little –”

“Girl?”

Xander sighs. “You know what I mean. I’m supposed to be able to protect people and I failed big time.”

“Because of Gachnar. Not because of you.”

Xander nods wearily. “And I’m going to make sure it stays not because of me. I’m going to get myself so good at soldiering, I’ll be able to fight anything, anywhere, anytime.”

Sounds dangerous. “Sounds manly.” After all, magic sounds dangerous to some.

“I mean it, Will. I’m going to train harder, push myself and know the manuals inside out. I’m going to make it so automatic there’s no way I’ll fail.”

They come to a stop in front of the mirror. Willow says, “You won’t fail” and tries not to blink as the retina scan traces their eyes. “So is that why you’re here?”

“No, it’s just actually my first shift down there.” Xander lets her step into the elevator first. “From what I hear it’s pretty straight forward – fetching and carrying but with demons.”

“That’s pretty much it. You’ll be like a hospital porter with a gun.” And no duty of care.

“Sounds fun. Just don’t ask me to clean up any demon gunk.”

The elevator shudders to a halt and asks for vocal identification. Willow says, “We have people for that” and the elevator moves on.

It opens on, “Warren.” Willow tries to supress a sigh. “I thought Chris was on this shift?” She steps around Warren when he doesn’t move out the way.

“Warren, huh?” Xander gives him a cool nod. “Good to meet you.”

Willow gestures to him. “This is Private Harris.”

Xander gives her a look that asks why she didn’t go with Xander and then gets why. Down here, it’s probably best they don’t act too pally.

Warren returns the nod, then tells her, “Chris dropped out. So you get to work with me.”

Willow doesn’t attempt to look enthused at the idea. Xander makes a little movement beside her, like he almost clapped her on the shoulder and then stopped himself. “I’d better go sign myself in” he says.

“See you” says Willow. As Xander walks off, she asks Warren, “Dropped out? Like out of college?”

“Out of the project at least” says Warren.

“Why?”

“Why’s it matter? Are you hot for the guy?”

“No. Just concerned.”

“Well be concerned on your own time. We’ve got work to do. Play your card right now he’s gone, and they might even put you on the classified project.”


	7. Beer Bad

The brain scans are labelled, so that they can be told apart. All too easy to mistake a human brain for a vampire one. Willow is careful not to mix them up as she looks over them, recording her observations as she goes.

She’s finally in on a classified project, namely behaviour modification. The aim, which Professor Walsh briefed her on this morning, is staggeringly ambitious. They really think they can put implants in vampires’ brains and stop them hurting anyone. It sounds impossible. But the thing is, the day before she met Buffy, Willow would have said vampires are impossible.

They kind of are. Looking at the brain scans, knowing that these are creatures that move and think without a circulatory system, she knows it’s impossible without magic. How can she expect the Initiative to make ground breaking discoveries if they don’t know about magic?

Then again, maybe they do after all. They couldn’t have studied these creatures in this much detail without finding it out.

And yet, the idea of telling them that she’s a witch still just feels wrong. It feels out of place in this clinical place with its scientific focus and its insistence that HSTs are just another part of the animal kingdom. Talking about witchcraft here would seem strange. And dangerous.

Not that there’s anything dangerous about the project, so far as Willow can see. Outlandish, sure, but not dangerous. If they actually could stop vamps from hurting people, that’s got to be a tick in the old _the Initiative are good people who are trying to help_ column.

Except. Except, simplistic as this sounds, even in the privacy of her own mind, Willow already knows a way to stop vampires from hurting people. It involves a wooden stake.

The Initiative know it too. The soldiers even carry a stake each, along with their guns and tasers. Xander showed her. So why go to all the trouble of building behaviour modification implants?

She asked as much when Professor Walsh talked to her this morning. Professor Walsh had laughed fondly and said, “I can see you have a keen mind. But one thing at a time. At the moment, we’re still trying to work out if it’s even possible on these hostiles. They’re more complex than anything we’ve tried it on before.”

What comes under anything, Willow wonders. The animals in the studies Professor Walsh made her name with? Or other creatures, creatures in the holding cells down here? Willow could read all about the former in the campus library (and intends to) but the staff at the campus library don’t even know the latter exists.

Also, is doing something to see if you can before you even think about the implications ever a good idea?

Of course, Professor Walsh probably has thought about the implications, whatever she tells Willow. After all, you have to have some quite enticing implications to persuade tech corps and the government to part with millions of dollars for a lab like the one Willow is seated in.

So, what were those implications?

“Hey Willow.” Riley walks in, with his easy smile, behind which Willow suspects the thought of implications has never crossed his mind.

Willow smiles back, “Hey.”

He slaps more scans down on one of her piles. On the wrong one actually. “Got some more for you. They were just finishing up when I was on my way out, so I said I’d drop them in.”

“Thanks. Hey, Riley” Willow pauses as Riley, turning towards the door, also pauses. She was going to ask him about implications, but she decides the chances of him thinking as deeply about them the whole time he’s been here as she has since this morning aren’t great. So instead she asks, “Have you heard from Chris?”

He frowns. “Chris?”

“Chris Epps. The intern who dropped out.”

“Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah I know who you mean, but I haven’t heard from him.”

“I was just wondering if he’s okay. I tried to get in touch with him but it’s just radio silence.” And home phone silence, and silence from the roommate who told her Chris has left college. What Willow saw as a chance to get Chris talking now he doesn’t have the Initiative lurking and listening has become a real concern for his wellbeing.

Riley shrugs good-naturedly. “I haven’t heard from him. But I didn’t really know him.”

“I know. It’s just, I wondered if anyone from the Initiative have.”

“You could try Graham. He’s a TA in a few of his classes.”

“I already did. He doesn’t know anything either.”

“It’s a shame. He could have done well here.” Riley offers another shrug and a smile, then departs.

Willow returns to her observations. It’s monotonous work, but that happens with concordant readings. The important thing is they are building the data they need up and up. The vampires down here must have spent more time in the MRI scanner than the holding cells in the last few days.

Which has got to be better than just being staked, right? Not that it matters. They’re vampires. Evil, soulless and all that. But if they could have an implant to stop them hurting people, that has to beat being staked.

But then, hadn’t she been more comfortable with the thought of staked Harmony than prisoner Harmony?

But this is different. With an implant, the vampires could go back out into the world, theoretically.

And only theoretically. Because that wouldn’t happen, Willow realises. There’s no way the Initiative are about to let half its HSTs walk free with little anti-bite chips in their brains. For one thing, that’s an expensive bit of tech to let them leave with. For another, it’s not like they’re all going to settle down into jobs with nightshift options and never cause any harm. They’ll cause any harm they still can. And however long an implant lasts, a vampire could last longer.

So, what do they want these vampires for?

When Willow finishes up for the day, she heads to the canteen. Xander is on duty and they’ve agreed to meet and catch up while making it look like they’re casual acquaintances just passing the time of day. “And sound casual too” she had said, “I’m not completely sure they’re not bugging the place.”

“Paranoid, much? They’re not going to spy on their own people.”

“Xander, just humour me?”

Xander had rolled his eyes, but replied, “Sure, okay.” Now, when Willow walks into the canteen, he greets her with, “Will, you look like your brain’s busier than it wants to be” which is way too familiar for casual acquaintances.

“It’s Willow” she tells him meaningfully.

After a confused second, he catches on. “Right. Sorry, I heard Will.”

“It’s okay.” Willow smiles. “My friends sometimes call me that.” She goes to chose some lunch from the uninspiring options on display. She actually likes it when he and Buffy call her Will. It’s less girly than Willow. Not that she minds being girly, just not all the time.

Harmony was the girliest girl who ever girled. Willow wonders if she still is. It’s sort of weird that vampires still retain a gender expression, even though they’re just demons. HSTs. Or, maybe not so weird, because it helps them camouflage themselves among their prey. They probably instinctively use the memories of the person they take over as a blueprint. Harmony’s girliness has been stolen.

She returns, tray in hands, to sit down close to where Xander’s standing guard. It’s kind of weird that they have armed guards all over the facility, even the canteen. Even the soldiers seem to think so, because they chat here while, elsewhere in the facility, they stand silently.

“So, busy?” he asks her.

“And then some. But at least Warren’s busy with his own stuff.” There are, it turns out, two classified projects. She is only in on one, the one quite a lot of people seem to know about, but Warren is also involved in the top secret one. Good as it is that it means she doesn’t often have to work with him, Willow can’t help but wonder why he is trusted and she isn’t.

Maybe because his brain is less busy. Or at least, busy with hows and not whys.

Xander smiles and says, “Yeah, I saw him around near section three. Thought that must be a break for you.” At her warning frown, he adds, “Because he’s such a charmer” like they didn’t spend their last phone call bemoaning Warren’s lack of charm.

Maybe all this pretending like they’re near strangers thing is pointless? After all, if the canteen is bugged, the phone lines from the barracks could be tapped. Willow sighs and wishes Xander had more time away from armying. She asks him, “What about you – How are you finding it?”

“It’s okay.” His grin gives him away. “I brought two vamps in last night. Not single handedly obviously, but I did take one of them down and it was me that spotted the other.”

“That’s great!”  
“Well, someone else would have spotted him eventually.” Xander pauses, and amends, “It.”

Willow concentrates on her bland food as a group of scientists walk past. Professor Patel gives her a little wave. Once they’ve gone, Xander asks, “Hey, how’s that roommate you were telling me about?”

“She’s alright. Well, alright might be putting it strongly. She’s still getting over that jerk I also told you about.”

“Right, that jerk. She’s still hung up him, huh?”

*****

“I’m not hung up on him” Buffy insists later, in their room. “I just…I’m just not completely over him. That’s not the same thing.”

“It is kind of adjacent” Willow points out.

“Right. But not the same thing.” Buffy sighs and takes a turn about the room. She tends to pace when she’s stressed. Willow knew it before, but now they’re living together, it’s all the more noticeable. She wonders if it’s a slayer thing. Buffy paces a little like the demons in their cells. Not that Buffy’s a demon, of course. But it’s the same sort of wildness.

Buffy stops pacing and asks, “Hey, do you want to go out somewhere? I could use a night away from the alleged moping.”

Willow had planned to call in to see Oz. Between her nightshifts in the Initiative lab and his Dingoes commitments, she hasn’t had a chance to ask him if her doing spells with Tara is okay or explain why she’d need to ask. Tonight was going to be for that ooky conversation but, “Sure, that sounds fun.” It’s totally not procrastination if she’s helping a friend. Besides, it gives them a chance to talk somewhere the Initiative definitely won’t be listening.

*****

“Would they really be listening?” asks Buffy, as they sit down with a beer each in a campus bar.

“I don’t know” replies Willow, “But there’s still nothing to make me less paranoid. I can’t even talk to Xander down there, in case they catch on to us being close. If they” She breaks off, glances around. Continues quieter, taking advantage of the noisy bar, “If they caught me snooping or sharing intel with you, I wouldn’t put it past them to use Xander against me somehow.”

“Jeepers.”

Willow nods and examines her beer. She isn’t exactly happy about illegal drinking but when they’d walked in, the man behind the bar had offered them alcohol straight away, no question of ID and before she knew what to say, Buffy had accepted. Which, fair enough, Buffy saves the world, she should be allowed a beer. But being offered it just like that makes Willow all kinds of suspicious.

Then again, if this place is on the wrong side of the law, at least there won’t be people from the Initiative drinking here, because, “I might be wrong. They seem all respectable. And Xander thinks they wouldn’t spy on us. But then, Xander is embracing army mode big time.”

“Well that’s probably a good thing, right?” Buffy sips her beer and gains a foamy moustache. “If he likes it, I mean.” She sticks her lower lip out, sucks in the foam.

“Oh, he likes it. Running around with a load of guys catching monsters? He must feel like he’s in an action movie. Plus I think he’s overcompensating after the whole fears come to life deal and it’s making him focus all on the exciting soldiering and less on the what are these guys even up to deal.” Willow glances up as a rowdy group of guys enter, then down at her beer. She hasn’t drunk any yet and she tells herself that that’s because she’s busy talking, and not because only a year ago, she was scared to leave school during lunchtime in case they’d changed the rule about seniors being able to do that. Quietly, she says, “Not that Xander has to worry about what they’re up to, I guess. I mean, he actually joined the army. I knew from the start I’d be all double agenty.”

“Well, yeah” says Buffy, “But he can do both. I mean, don’t tell me you aren’t loving the science, paranoia or not.”

“It is pretty fascinating.” Willow allows herself a smile.

“See? No rule that says you can’t learn and have fun.”

“True. And I know he’s not about to ignore anything evil. It’s just, when humans are involved evil doesn’t feel evil. And with the Halloween thing knocking his confidence too, I’ve got some Xander worry.”

“Poor Xander” says Buffy, “that was definitely my second least favourite Halloween but probably his worst.” She takes a deeper gulp of her beer.

“Yeah” says Willow, “At least last time something went skewwhiff, he got to be a soldier.”

“And this time he had to be rescued by Anya in a bunny costume.” Buffy shrugs. “He’ll deal. I mean, we all got rescued by Anya in a bunny costume.” She takes another gulp of beer. Willow glances at her own. She should completely be allowed to drink. She works for the government. She says, “I’m not loving being rescued by Anya either. I mean, sure, she’s human now, but does she have to be a human hanging out with us?”

“I think we’ll have to learn to deal. She’s pretty fixated on Xander.”

“Well, he’s too busy armying to keep a high maintenance ex vengeance demon happy, and good, because ex vengeance demon! I mean, do vengeance demons even have souls?”

Buffy shrugs again. “She must have one now at least – She’s human.”

“I suppose. However that happened.” How did it happen, wonders Willow. She’s always known how easy it is to move from human to demon – just look at Jesse – but demon to human? She thinks of the vampire girl in the MRI scanner. Now the demons are a research commodity, she wants the two categories as distinct as possible. Anya is a wrench in the works. In a bunny costume. 

“So what else is new?” asks Buffy, “Did you learn any more about the implant thingys?” Willow had filled her in on the classified project a few nights ago when she tagged along on patrol. It felt good to actually have some solid information at last.

“Nothing new” says Willow, “But it’s still super interesting. I really want to see if we can actually pull it off. I mean, the brain is so complicated and becoming a demon really doesn’t make it less so. To be able to control it like that!” She feels herself grin.

Buffy faux-pouts. “If you do it to all of them, that’s me out of a job.” Then she smiles, maybe because she knows that won’t happen, or maybe because she likes the idea that it could.

“But what would we do with them? If we even pull it off, I mean.”

“Send them back out there being harmless and kinda pissed?”

Willow, beer half way to her lips, lowers her glass to say, “No, I thought about that today. They’d still cause trouble somehow and the implants will be expensive.” She frowns. “I’ll have to ask Professor Walsh again. I can make it sound like I’m just interested. And actually, I pretty much am just interested. I don’t see any harm in making some vamps less of a threat.” She raises her beer again, gets it to her lips this time and wrinkles her nose. “Does this smell off to you?”

Buffy frowns. “Can beer go off?”

“Not that sort of off, just…” Magic off, Willow realises. It’s not that it smells but that there’s something wrong. She is about to share, but that is when the group of guys on the other side of the bar start turning into cavemen.

*****

“It was probably up there in the top ten weirdest things I’ve seen Buffy fight” Willow tells Oz the next day, “And I’ve seen her fight hyena people.”

“I gave up on a list a while back” he replies, “So the guys are going to be okay?”

“As far as we can tell, they’re back to normal. They just think they got really drunk but we found all this cursed beer during the fight.”

“Cursed by who?”

“The barman, for reasons. I gave him one of my looks and Buffy hinted that cavefrats aren’t the only thing she can beat up.” Obviously, that had been a bluff. Buffy would never hurt a human. But what could they do but bluff?

Willow wonders if technically she should report him. She’s only been told to report possible HST sightings but it seems a little odd to have an organised group of people acting on government authority around and not tell them about a human causing mystical harm. But then, she’d have to tell them about magic. And what could they do with the guy? Not put him on trial.

Probably best not to find out.

“Are you okay?” asks Oz, “You didn’t drink the stuff, right?”

Willow shakes her head. “Buffy had some but not enough to make a cave slayer. She’s not exactly sparkling this morning, but no harm done. And I didn’t have any. It smelled ooky. Bad magic ooky.”

“Bad magic has a smell?”

“Maybe not a smell, more a feeling that my nose noticed first.” Willow wonders if that’s anything like how the wolf perceives things, but Oz never talks about the wolf’s experience. Says he can’t remember it, in fact, though she sometimes wonders.

All he says now is, “Huh.”

“Hey, speaking of magic, I wondered if you’d let me…” Willow thinks about how to phrase it.

“Let you do what?” Oz looks faintly puzzled. They don’t really have a relationship where anything needs permission given, unless it’s a sexual thing.

Which it sort of is. “I was thinking…Tara and me thought about…Well about working magic together.”  
“Like setting up a rival wicca club that actually does magic?”

“Not really. In that, we’d be the only members. We were thinking we could do spells just the two of us.”

Oz looks more puzzled than ever. “Why would you need my permission for that?”

“It’s sort of…Some people would see it as…as very intimate.”

Oz just waits for her to go on.

Willow explains, “If you do spells with just one person, just to explore magic and build your art, and you keep doing that with the same person, it can get pretty involved. You create something together and if anything goes wrong you deal with that fear together. And sometimes, you might be reading their thoughts or sharing their emotions. It bonds you.”  
“Sounds intense. But why are you asking permission?”

“Because it’s intimate. It creates intimacy.”

“Intimacy like you and the scoobies have? A facing danger together sort of deal?”

Willow wishes he hadn’t heard magic and immediately jumped to danger, but that’s not the thing to focus on right now. “No” she says, “Well, not really. It’s more…” She takes a breath “Some people see it as sexual.”

Oz frowns. “Is it?”

Yes and no. After all, it’s not like she and Tara are going to start doing sex magic. But then, the line between sex magic and other forms of magic is more blurred than the line between actual sex and platonic stuff. In the world outside of magic, there is even a clear distinction between holding hands with Oz and holding hands with Buffy. Except that she sometimes likes holding hands with Buffy more than she should, even if it is just to stay together when the Bronze is crowded. Goddess, this is complicated. “We won’t do anything physical” she says carefully, “But it’s not that, it’s the intimacy.”

“The intimacy that comes from being creative together and working together on a shared passion?”

“Yes.”

“So, you want me to stop seeing Devon?”

Willow feels her lip twitch, but she forces herself to say, “It’s different with magic. It’s more intense than music.”

“Yeah, in an it-could-get-you-killed way. So from where I’m standing, if someone else is there with you, that’s of the good.”

“Even if I’m sharing things with them that I can’t share with you?”

“I can’t talk shop with you the way I do with the band, can I?”

“No. But. It is different with magic. We don’t ever mind meld, for one.”

“Well, we don’t need to if we’re always honest with each other, do we?”

“I guess not.”

“Willow, I don’t mind you having a friend. Even if she’s a friend you’ve got something complicated with. Just as long as I’m still your guy.”

“You are. You are my guy.”

Oz gives her a little smile. “That’s okay then.” He moves in for a kiss.

*****

From the outside, it looks like no-one is living in Chris’s house. When his mom opens the door about half way, it looks like no-one’s living in it from the inside too. The woman stares blankly out at Willow, one hand wrapped around a beer and the other still on the door like she’s about to shut it again. Willow offers a smile and says, “Hi. Is Chris home?”

Mrs Epps half shakes her head. In the background, sports commentary blares. Willow only realises that’s the full extent of her answer when Mrs Epps starts to close the door. “Wait!”

Mrs Epps pauses, then opens the door back to half way.

“I’m Willow.” Willow forces a smile. “I’m a friend of his.” That’s hardly true but it comes out convincing, way more convincing than it would have been a year ago when any lie she told was immediately undercut by a twitch. Maybe she’s gotten better at lying or maybe she’s gotten less honest. She’s sure there’s a difference there somewhere. Or maybe Chris is almost a friend, once you factor in friendly science fair competition. A could-have-been-a-friend. “Do you know when he’ll be back?” Getting nothing this time, Willow elaborates, “I just wanted to see if he’s okay, after dropping out and everything. I did ask one of his TAs but he hasn’t heard from him, so…” She trails off hopefully.

After a beat or two, Mrs Epps offers, “He’s left town.” Mrs Epps glances back into the interior of the house as a televised cheer erupts. “Went to take up some scholarship in Nevada.”

“Oh.” Willow should be happy, she knows. It was too bad for Chris to have to give up college. It should be great news that he got a scholarship somewhere else. But something nags at her.

Alarm bells, she realises. The alarm bells she’s developed over years of living on the hellmouth are waking up and ringing.

Hadn’t Chris said his mom needs him around?

“Yeah” says Mrs Epps grimly, as if Willow has said something more insightful than _oh_. “He left a note.”

“A note?” 

“Saying he was going.”

Screaming alarm bells now. “Like, a handwritten note?”

“Typed. He’s into his computers. His brother, Daryl, he was the sportsman. You wanna come see him win the ’95 trophy?”

“Um. No thanks. The thing is, I’d really like to talk to him – um, Chris – about this project we were both working on. And to say hi. Do you mind giving me his number?”

“He didn’t leave one.” Mrs Epps closes the door.

*****

“He might have just left” Tara offers her later, along with iced tea and a plate of cookies. “It d-doesn’t sound like things are great at home so maybe he just didn’t want a drawn out exit.”

“Maybe” says Willow. She wishes she could share the real reason for her unease, but she hasn’t told Tara about the Initiative and doesn’t want to. It’s one thing for the scoobies to know – they are all about the demon fighting and the Initiative are at least tangential – but Tara isn’t involved in anything dangerous and Willow wants to keep it that way. She can at least say, “I could see a note based exit for sure. But a typed note? Who does that? And he told me his mom needs him around, like it was UC Sunnydale or nothing.”

“W-we could check.”

“Check? Oh! Location spell!”

“Exactly.”

“Do you have a map?”

“I have a computer. Next best thing.” Tara searches for a map on the machine she has in a corner, adorned with fairy lights and competing for space with piles of books. The is a printer too, as old as the computer, like maybe Tara didn’t have much to spend on the tech and went with what she could get. It’s all in working order, though, and before long, they are looking at three maps: One of Nevada, one of California and one of the whole USA, just to be sure.

Doing magic with Tara doesn’t feel all that different to doing magic with anyone else. For one thing, it’s not intimate yet, because this isn’t exploration or creativity, it’s just a task to accomplish: Find Chris. But also, Willow had wondered whether, with Tara’s demon side, there might be an edge to her power. Some unnerving otherness or something. There isn’t. Tara’s power is soft and warm and strong like a fierce hug or a fortifying hot drink on a cold day. It feels a little more comfortable, even familiar, than magic with the handful of other people she has cast with – Giles, Amy, Michael, Anya of all people – but aside from that, not really different to magic with a full human.

Is full human maybe a twisted way of looking at it, Willow wonders. Human isn’t genetics, it’s a soul, morality, personality and all sorts of other transcendent things. Any other way of defining it feels loaded.

They don’t find Chris. He isn’t in Nevada taking up the supposed scholarship, or in California just not talking to his mom. He isn’t in the USA.

They print out another map and they still don’t find him. It’s a world map.

“M-maybe we’re doing it wrong?”

“No” says Willow, studying the Chris-less world, “I know we’re not. I could tell.” Tara could too. She’s just being optimistic.

“I-I know you don’t want to hear this, but I th-think some books have maps of d-demon dimensions.” Tara looks down quickly like she’s ashamed, like she’d have anything in common with the sort of demons who steal people away.

The thing is, Willow knows Chris isn’t in a demon dimension. Leaving the Initiative only to fall into one is a bigger coincidence than generally happens in this town, and anyway, “Trans-dimensional demons don’t leave fake goodbye notes.”

Tara takes her hand. Willow squeezes it gratefully. “He’s not kidnapped.” At least not by demons. And at least not any more.


	8. Wild at Heart

Xander recognises Spike the same second the taser has the vampire hitting the ground. It honestly takes a bit of effort not to punch the air and whoop, but he reins himself in, keeps things professional. The team inject Spike with the standard sedatives while he’s still stunned, get him strapped to a stretcher and then fan out to see if this HST was with a mate or hunting in a pack. Nothing. Not surprising really: Buffy said Spike was with Harmony last time he was in town, and Xander figures no-one could put up with Harmony that long.

Spike, meanwhile, is still down. _Spike_. It’s not that long ago that he had Xander scared. Had him prisoner, even. Now, he’s zonked out on the ground, right at Xander’s mercy. Xander thinks of parent-teacher night as he drags the vampire away and tries to hide his grin. It’s amazing what the right back up will do for a guy.

*****

Brains don’t look the same way in the flesh as they do in scans. In scans, they are flat and neatly mapped out. The flesh is gorier, complicated by blood and by body parts never being as clear as computer generated image of body parts. Still, Willow impresses herself by focusing on the mission, not the messiness. Not that she minds blood – In high school biology she was all about the dissection – it’s just that the context feels intense. Nothing she cut open in biology was going to wake up and wonder what happened to it.

It helps that she’s really just assisting. Dr Angleman does the actual surgery. He is wearing blue gloves that turn black with blood that splashes and seeps up his arms to his white-clad elbows. He ends up looking proudly down at the unconscious chipped vampires.

They are laid out in a row, like dolls he has just finished making. Three of them. A female, the one Willow has seen plenty of times already in the cells and the MRI scanner, and two males she’s seen less of.

They have one more to do, but Dr Angleman decides to take a break from the surgery before they fetch it and prepare it for surgery. Willow can’t blame him: She’s itching to peel off her bloodied gloves and hers still have some blue bits.

Once they are cleaned up, Dr Angleman has Willow take notes, which he dictates. It’s annoying, actually. He could easily write them himself or use a Dictaphone. Willow is pretty sure he wouldn’t ask Warren to act like his personal secretary.

She doesn’t have long until her shift ends, though, so it’s easier to just go along with it. She sits down at the computer he directs her to and types as he walks between the three vampires, taking reading from the machines they are hooked up to. The fourth – patient? Subject? – isn’t in here because there’s only the three operating tables. Willow wonders which of the vamps they’ve been taking scans of it will turn out to be.

While she’s wondering, Dr Angleman is talking fast, but Willow can type fast, even without her full attention on it. She doesn’t stall until she registers, “Um, Doctor? Sorry, did you say hostiles four, nine and seventeen?”

“That’s right.” Dr Angleman barely glances her way.

The numbers are new to Willow. When they were measuring how the vampire’s brains reacted to images of demons and humans, the identifiers were only known to the guys getting them out the cells, who then didn’t perform the experiments to avoid bias. “But…We only had ten in the MRI studies. Where’d seventeen come from?”

Dr Angleman looks annoyed, like it’s not perfectly reasonably ask when she’s a part of the project now. Willow concentrates on not looking embarrassed at all.

“We had more, originally” he tells her, “In the first trial.”

“You’ve done this before? I thought this was the first time the implants were being used?”

“It’s the first time using this version.” Dr Angleman lifts the lid of one of the male vampire’s eyes. “We had a basic prototype we used on six a few months back.”

“What happened?”

Dr Angleman lets the vampire’s eye snap closed. “It made them vegetables. Completely useless. We’re more confident about this one but we’re only using four. Six was an expensive mistake. Especially as one has to be tested to destruction to find the right settings for the rest.”

Willow doesn’t like what her stomach does at that but she reminds herself that Buffy dusts these creatures every night and it doesn’t matter: They are vampires.

It’s just, it feels different when Buffy does it. For one thing, Buffy does it fast. “Tested how?”

Dr Angleman glances at her. “Once we’ve got the notes on these three you can prep the fourth before the end of your shift. Professor Patel can assist me after I’ve had my coffee. I’m not slicing up another one without caffeine.”

“Right. Um, any particular one?”

“Any. One of these bloodsuckers is much like another.”

“Right.” Willow isn’t exactly hyped about choosing. For all the implant will stop them from hurting people, it is brain surgery that these vampires didn’t want to happen. She can take part, sure, but she’d rather not be the one to choose which vampire they do it to. Especially while it’s still awake. 

Dr Angleman leans against a counter and goes on with his notes. Willow sets aside her unease and types.

She finishes a little after he has finished talking, and he doesn’t wait. Actually, that’s a little sloppy of him: The three vampires they’ve already chipped are dead to the world (more so than usual) but it’s still against protocol for her to stay in the room alone with them. No point wasting the chance for a snoop though, so Willow gives each vamp a quick examination. If someone walks in, they can hardly punish her for doing scientific observation, it’s what she’s here to do. Not that she learns anything beyond confirming how gristly sutured head wounds are. That and just how fast vampires heal: The lines of stiches already look less raw in two of the subjects. Subjects is maybe the best way to look at it.

Fast healing is something to focus on when she chooses the last vamp.

The surgery took place in a little operating theatre set aside from most of the rest of the complex. When she leaves, Willow heads for the pit, beyond which are the sections of the facility she is more familiar with.

She’s not the only one who doesn’t spend much time in this wing, apparently: The corridors she passes through are empty.

As Willow walks, her own unchipped brain mulls over the unconscious vampires, which gets her on to thinking about the Initiative in general, which gets her on to the non-answers she got from Professor Walsh when she tried to ask about Chris.

Not that she was expecting much. It’s not like Professor Walsh was going to say anything other than what she said, that Chris has left UC Sunnydale and that’s the end of that. Well, and she’d said that Willow shouldn’t waste any time on someone who’d chosen to throw away his best chance at success, but that was just extra meanness, not extra information.

Like thinking about extra meanness summoned him up, Warren appears from a side room. Willow tries to force a smile, manages a not-scowl and settles for that. “Hey. Long night?”

“Nothing I can’t handle” he replies, “Why? Can’t you?”

“I’m fine.” So much for preliminary small talk. Willow decides to jump straight to, “Listen, I was wondering if you ever hear from Chris?”

Warren frowns. “Why’d I hear from that loser?”

“It’s just a question.”

“Yeah, a question you’d better stop asking if you want to stick around. You’re playing with the grown ups now. People here have better things to do than worry about some geek who couldn’t hack it.” Then, oddly, Warren laughs. “Hack it” he mutters to himself, as if appreciating a private joke.

They reach the pit and find a little flurry of activity, the kind that happens when a new hostile is brought in. Dr Angleman apparently got waylaid en route to his coffee, because he’s down there, examining the new captive along with Seth. Seth moves slightly to the side, and Willow gets a clear view of the creature. She gasps.

“What?” Warren asks.

Willow wanders over to the railing that line the pit, looks down. “I know him. I mean, it. I’ve seen it before.”

Because it’s Spike down there. Spike in his leather coat, looking completely out of place as he’s lifted from stretcher to gurney and hooked up to readers for the preliminary observations team. Willow spots Xander down there too. He gives Willow a cheery wave when he glances up and sees her because he is apparently completely incapable of pretending they don’t know each other well.

Warren asks, “He your boyfriend?”

Willow rolls her eyes. “Just a friend.”

“The hostile, then. Were you bumping uglies with it without realising it’s a vamp?”

Ew. “Like I wouldn’t recognise the lack of body heat.” Oz is warm in every way Spike -or Warren, actually – could never hope to be. “Not that it’s any of your business who I… do that with.” She wishes she could say the words without blushing but settles for a glare instead. She turns her back on Spike to head down the corridor that leads to the holding cells, but stalls as Dr Angleman spots her and calls up: “Not to worry, Ms Rosenberg, we can just use this one.”

Willow turns back. Her shock must show on her face because Dr Angleman adds, “Saves us sedating another one.”

Willow finds the stairway down to the pit proper and descends. There must still be shock on her face because Dr Angleman adds, “Not quite as effective as general anaesthesia but it’ll do.”

A distant part of Willow notes that Dr Angleman is the type to talk if you say nothing and look surprised. That could be useful. A closer part of Willow says, “Are you sure? I don’t mind doing the anaesthesia.” They trained her to administer it to vamps last week. If she was doing it to humans, she’d have to train for years, but she’s not, she’s doing it to vampires and they are tougher and require only a liquid given via a canula, and besides, “We don’t want him – um, it – to suffer necessarily, right?”

Dr Angleman shrugs. “They’re only animals.” Willow wonders if he has any pets.

She glances at Xander. He looks uneasy but says nothing. Dr Angleman adds, “You’re finishing soon anyway. You don’t need to worry about being in on the operation if you’re squeamish.”

“I’m not squeamish, I just think if we’re going to –” Willow stops and looks at Xander, who looks at the floor. Officially, he doesn’t know about the project, so she can’t say _if we’re going to perform brain surgery, we should probably go with general anaesthetic_. Which, thinking about it, is a type of squeamish. But Willow is pretty sure it’s a type of squeamish she wants to be.

Dr Angleman just says, “Sedation is fine.” He turns to Seth. “Doctor Hobbs, how about we move it to the OR now? We can do the preliminary obs from there.”

“Sure.” Seth signals to another scientist and they wheel Spike away. As they pass Willow, she sees that Spike’s eyes are open. He stares blankly at her for a moment and then he’s gone. Dr Angleman gives Willow a nod. “Coffee first” he decides, and ambles off.

Willow turns to Xander. “Sedation?” she whispers, “How’s that the same as general anaesthetic?”

“That depends what it’s for.”

Willow glances around the pit. Scientists and soldiers are working on a green skinned demon a few metres away. Warren watches from the railings above. “I can’t say.”

“Then I can’t judge.” Xander gives a brief, nervous laugh and stops. “Look, if it’s what I think it’s for, Spike can take it. Kind of deserves to when you think about it.”

“Does anything deserve no anaesthetic when there’d normally be some?”

There is no trace of Xander’s smile left but he says, “He tortured people with railroad spikes, remember?”

Willow remembers that, and more besides. Back when Spike and Drusilla first came to town, she’d read all she could about their exploits. But if they are going to avenge the people Spike killed, how come they treated Angel like one of gang once upon a time, after everything he’d done?

Maybe that’s not quite the right comparison. The soul complicated things. But still, if they are going to get vampires back for all the bad things they’ve done, this place would be a torture chamber. “We’re not torturers.” Then she thinks of Chris. What did they do to him? Please Hecate, not torture, but he’s still gone.

Xander doesn’t know that, of course. She can’t speak freely here and he pretty much lives here and at the barracks these days. The one time he had enough down time to come and meet her for lunch in town, he brought Forest along. 

Now, Xander smiles obliviously. “Spike be fine, Will. Which, weird thing to want reassurance about, but I’m not judging. Like the doctor said, sedation’s good enough. Look, I’ve got to go. I’m still on the recon team. Try not to worry.” And off he goes.

Willow makes her way out the pit, not doing all that well on the try not to worry front. Warren greets her with, “I still say you must have been at it with Chris. Why else do you keep asking about the guy?”

It’s almost a relief. It stops her thinking about anaesthetic. “I don’t keep asking” she replies, “I only asked…” Graham, Riley, Professor Walsh, Warren. That has to be it, or they’ll take notice. “A few people because I wanted to check he’s okay.” She heads towards the elevator, not the one at the exit but one of a pair off to the side that will take her to the bio lab on the next level down. She has a few tasks to finish before her shift ends.

Warren follows. “Thing is, you won’t be okay if you keep asking questions about that loser. You want in on the other classified project, you’ll forget about Chris. He wasn’t the sort of guy to waste time on.”

So apparently they’ve already taken notice. “Why’d you even care?”

Warren shrugs, then trails his gaze over her. “If you get in on the top level project, I’m not going to complain about the eye candy.”

Willow bristles. “I have a boyfriend” she says, and then she wishes she hadn’t, because why should that matter?

Warren shrugs again. “I’m only looking. Can’t you take a compliment?”

They are at the elevator. Willow takes a step back. “I’m going to go see about the hostile down there.” No way is she getting into an elevator with this creep. “Oh, and Warren? You drooling over a girl isn’t a compliment.” She turns to walk away and stalls as he retorts, “Drooling? Don’t flatter yourself. If you’re going to be that way, go screw up like Chris did. You’ve made a start already with all these questions.”

Willow turns back around. “Chris was asking questions?”

Warren gives a snort of laughter. “Not any more he’s not.” Then the elevator arrives and he steps inside, and is gone, before Willow can ask any more.

*****

Even Buffy doesn’t know about Chris. Between her lectures, Willow’s lectures and Willow’s shifts at the Initiative facility, there hasn’t been time for Willow to hint that they should take a walk away from their possibly bugged dorm room. Even free evenings have been a rarity: Willow has worked a few double shifts this week and Buffy accepted an offer of a night out with Frankie of all people. Willow suspects that their own caveman-crashed girls’ night out wasn’t sufficient on the getting-over-Parker front. And then the one time she could join Buffy on patrol and almost told her everything, they were interrupted by vampires. Apparently, it will be the same tonight, because they’ve barely had time to share a smile in-between stakings.

“So what’s the big?” asks Buffy, when Willow laments the lack of time to actually talk, “We live together. We can talk anytime.”

“Sure” says Willow, “But not about the Initiative.”

Buffy wrinkles her nose. “How about while you’re down there you actually find out if they’re spying on us or not instead of just wigging me.”

“Oh, believe me, if I knew how to find out for sure, I’d be down there doing that because ick, you know?”

“Major ick. What if I wanted to bring a guy back?”

It’s been so long since they just talked about boys like two girls with no worries that Willow smiles and asks, “Which guy do you have in mind?” like that’s what’s important right now.

Buffy gives her a coy smile. “No-one in particular. It’s just, Bronzing with Frankie, I was making with the flirting and I thought, isn’t that what college is supposed to be about?”

“Casual sex?”

“No! Meeting people. And I’m so over being sorry for myself because of Angel, so having the option of bring a guy back and neither of us being watched is something I’m really not adverse to.”

“Oh, I hear ya. Not that I’m going to bring anyone back who isn’t Oz, but that’d be nice.” Nicer still would be getting changed without wondering.

“Yeah. Oh, duty calls.” Buffy intercepts and approaching vampire, dusts herself down and falls back into step beside Willow. After a while she asks, “Hey, random question, but do you know a girl called Veruca?”

Willow frowns. “I don’t think so. Why?”

Buffy looks briefly evasive, but explains, “No reason really. I just wondered if she knows Oz. Frankie and me ran into him and Devon in the Bronze and she was there with someone from her band.”

“Oh, if she’s in a band, he’ll definitely know her.” Willow’s frown stays in place. She can trust Oz. But she can trust Buffy too, and Buffy wouldn’t ask about this girl unless she saw something. “Why? Was she flirting with him?”

“No. There was just… I wondered how they know each other is all.”

Willow reminds herself that Buffy was always prone to read something into Angel’s every interaction with a woman. He couldn’t have a conversation with Cordelia without it putting Buffy on edge. Not that Cordelia didn’t fuel that particular fire, and that didn’t help Buffy learn that relationships aren’t all like that. “Well, however it is, I’m not worried.”

“Oh, no, you don’t need to worry. Oz is one of the keepers. I think maybe Veruca knows that, but it’s not like he’d reciprocate. And I’m probably reading more into it than there was.”

“Right. Maybe she just didn’t realise he’s with someone.”

“Maybe.” Buffy doesn’t sound convinced. But that’s okay: Whatever Veruca thinks, Oz isn’t the type to stray.

They are more than halfway round Buffy’s usual patrol route now. Willow realises that if she is going to fill Buffy in on the Initiative she’d better start talking. “So, hey, Spike’s been captured.”

Buffy whips round. “What?”

“Yeah, they brought him in during my last shift. Well, Xander did.”

“Go Xander!” Buffy laughs. “I am kind of disappointed, though: I wanted to be the one to take him out.”

“No chance of that now. Unless you’re going to fight the army for him.”

“Oh, Spike is so not worth that. He’ll just have to be the one who got away.” Buffy frowns. “That came out wrong.”

“It’s not all sunshine and captured Spikes, though. Chris is missing.”

“Chris, Frankenstein Chris?”

“Yes.” Willow tells Buffy about the guy’s apparent doubt and his apparent, well, non-existence. “There’s no way he just upped and left town. And if he had, the location spell would show it.”

Buffy considers this solemnly. “And there’s no way the Initiative aren’t involved?”

Willow shakes her head. “A note to his mom? What demon would write that?”

“Sunday” replies Buffy, “But I guess that’s unusual. What does Xander think?”

“I haven’t had a chance to tell him yet. If there’s even a chance they’ve bugged our room, I’m not having that conversation down there in the labs.”

“Scooby meeting then?”

“Scooby meeting.”

*****

Xander tells the guys that he’s visiting his parents, which is kind of true because he’s going to Giles’. He makes his way into town on foot. Time was, it would seem too far to walk but now, it’s nothing. Nothing minus the kit he carried miles at a time during basic makes it less than nothing really. Plus, after a few nights on the recon team, it’s good to be out in the sunshine.

Not to mention, he’s not above dawdling on his way to a scooby meeting that’s more than a little troublesome since they’ll be talking about things he signed legal documents not to talk about. It hadn’t seemed like a big deal last time they sat around Giles’ living room speculating about the Initiative like they were all cleared to talk about it, but now, the idea is grating. Last time, he was only thinking in terms of the risk he was taking if he was caught and after facing off against demons, the law doesn’t seem that scary and besides, it was for Buffy and the others. It had been important then to check out what the Initiative were doing and how it fitted with Buffy’s mission. Now, they know that the Initiative are in the good guy camp, so talking about them with civilians feels like a betrayal.

He tries to push the thought from his mind. It’s not like Buffy is about to storm the facility and beat up the humans in there. So what’s the worst that can happen? Buffy and the others are used to secrets, and if they weren’t, who could they tell who had a chance against the army?

He’s still buzzed from last night’s patrol. Capturing Spike fulfilled a lot of fantasies his high school self simply wouldn’t have believed he’d ever fulfil back when Spike was gunning for Buffy and he’d wished he could protect her.

Not that Buffy needs protecting, of course, but he’s still psyched the vampire who gave her so much grief in now in the Initiative holding cells thanks to him.

Or the OR or the observation area or wherever they put Spike. Xander imagines him somewhere generically white tiled, conveniently unconscious because, much as he doesn’t care all that much if Spike suffers, he’s not actively rooting for it either. And it’s not like he wouldn’t have been given something to knock him out, whether Willow thought it was sufficient or not. That’s how things are done down there, or there’d be more screaming.

Not that he’s never heard screaming, come to think of it. But demons can make a hell of a noise at the best of times, so that doesn’t really mean anything. They could just be kicking up a fuss before the sedation kicks in.

“Xander?”

Xander takes a deep breath because this is getting awkward. “Anya. Again. What’s up?”

“I couldn’t see any of the scoobies on campus so I decided to visit you at the barracks.”

“Why were you looking for the scoobies?”

“Because they’re the people I know. Like you said, remember?”

“Right. Well, they’ll be at Giles’. I’m heading there now for a meeting.”

“Oh, then I’ll come with you.”

Great and be another civilian he’s shared intel with. “You can’t really. We’ll be talking about…well, scooby stuff.”

“Shouldn’t I talk about scooby stuff now? I did go to a party with you.”

“Not really. You busted in late with Giles and a chainsaw. That’s not really going to a party.”

“Depends on the party. I went to a Saint Vigeous Day feast once that made creative use of chainsaws. And I did save you from the man-eating house.”

He can’t deny that. “Maybe another time, but it’s confidential stuff today.”

“Oh, I’m a very confidential person. And I already know about demons.”

“It’s not that, it’s…” He is still too close to the base for this conversation. Not close enough for anyone to overhear, but close enough to be aware, be careful.

As careful as he should be all the time. “It’s just not something I can talk to a civilian about.”

Anya looks briefly puzzled, then exclaims, “Oh, you mean the whole army capturing demons thing! I know all about that.”

Xander glances quickly back towards the barracks. “Anya! What – um. Okay, first of all, try repeating that with your indoor voice.”

Anya frowns. “But we’re outside.”

“I just mean, be quiet. You’re not supposed to know what you just said. How did you find out?” Surely Willow and the others wouldn’t be so sloppy?

“From demons.”

Of course. Because Anya is still more at home with demons than people, probably hangs out with demons, practically still is one. “Right. Well, say that around the wrong people are there’ll be trouble.”

“Well, I’d better keep tabs on the wrong people then, hadn’t I? So I should come to the meeting?”

“No, because the meeting is about the good people. As in, the people fighting the demons.”

“See, I haven’t heard fighting, I’ve heard capturing. Capturing’s a whole different thing.”

“If it gets them off the streets, I don’t see how. Anyway, I’m not supposed to talk about this.”

“You’re going to a whole meeting to talk about this.”

And if he doesn’t take her, she could make life difficult for him, knowing that. Practically still a demon and all. “Fine. You can come along. But don’t go spreading this to anyone else.”

“But everyone’s talking about it anyway.”

“Any humans, I mean.”

“Oh, that’s okay. You guys are the only humans I know.” Anya smiles and falls into step beside him.

*****

When Willow asked him to host a meeting, it all sounded rather formal and serious, but Giles is still looking forward to seeing the children. Back in the high school, they filled the library with chatter on a daily basis and he had often regretted not having more time to quietly get on with research. Now, he has endless time for quiet research and nothing to research. The only real activity in the supernatural world is being generated by the Initiative and it is Willow and Xander who are in a position to study them.

Willow is the first to arrive, alone. She greets him with a smile but there is an air of underlying worry about her. “Buffy’s just coming” she tells him, “She had a lecture. Well, we both did, but she out essayed me and now she gets to lead a discussion group so she had to stay behind to talk to Riley.”

“Well done her.” Giles childes himself for the brief surprise he feels at this news. Buffy is very capable academically and he knows it, but it can be easy to forget it amid how extraordinary she is in other regards.

Normally, Willow would have a lot to say about the rare occurrence of someone outachieving her, but she only nods and says, “And Oz has band practice so he can’t make it, but I’m meeting him later so I can fill him in.”

“Of course. Willow, has something happened?”

Willow seems to hold on to her brave smile for a moment, recall that it isn’t needed here, and drops it. “Sort of. Well, nothing urgent. Or, nothing I think we can change, I mean.”

This is rather an intriguing way of putting it, but before Giles can comment on that, he notes her closed expression and decides not to.

Xander arrives next, with Anya in tow. He greets Willow with, “Will, you’re all on your lonesome? No Buffster, no Oz?”

“Xander brought me” points out Anya.

Xander looks a little panicked. “Not really the way I’d put it.”

Anya takes a seat. “You were going, you told me about it, I wanted to come, you agreed. You brought me.”

“But not in a date way.” Xander takes a seat on the other side of the room.

Giles wonders what his parents, who would be horrified at the presence of a former demon in his home but who raised him to make his guests comfortable, would make of all this. Hosting winning out over mistrust, he attempts to smooth things over with, “Tea, Anya? Xander?”

“Is it brewed?” asks Anya. Giles can’t help but smile. Handing her a cup, it occurs to him that she might be someone worth consulting on all this. She has seen enough of the world, after all.

Willow is telling Xander, “Buffy has a lecture but she’s on her way. Oz is with the band so I’ll just fill him in.”  
“Right” says Xander, “Because we can’t have too many people talking about this.”

Giles takes a seat. “We don’t really know what this is yet.”

Willow adds, “And no-one new is being told.”

“Sure. It’s just, we did sign contracts.”

“Not forgotten” agrees Willow, “I haven’t even told Tara.”

“The witch you brought over?” asks Giles.

“Brought in a date way?” asks Anya.

Willow blushes. At that moment, Buffy enters, not troubling to knock. Giles imagines that if the army ever get wind of this meeting, they won’t knock either. Once he’s offered Buffy tea (she refuses. She and Xander always do but he always offers), he prompts, “So, Willow, is there something specific to discuss?”

“Yeah” asks Xander, “What’s the up?”

Willow gives them a rather alarming account of a fellow scholarship student expressing some general doubt about the Initiative only to disappear. “And that’s off the face of the earth” Willow explains, “Tara and I did a location spell.”

“They probably killed him” says Anya.

Willow winces, but says, “Yes, I think they must have.”

“Or something else did” says Xander, “We do live on a hellmouth.”

Willow regards him sadly. “Xander, he left a note remember?”

“Maybe that was for real. He wants to leave, he writes a note, heads out, gets eaten.”

“A typed note. No-one leaves a typed note.”

“Maybe some people do?”

“I wouldn’t, and tech is my thing.”

Buffy asks, “Could the spell have gone wrong? I mean, no offence, Willow, but it can happen.”

Willow does look a little put out, but explains, “Tara’s been practising for years. Her mom was a witch, and her grandma.”

“We could check” Anya points out.

Willow scowls, but only says, “Sure. Check as much as you want. I know me and Tara are right or I wouldn’t have got us all here.”

“Right about him being missing” concedes Xander, “Because behold the absence of Chris, but that doesn’t mean the Initiative had anything to do with it.”

Giles says, “Much as I’m sure you want to think the best of people you’re working with, Xander, I can’t imagine Chris was killed by something unrelated to the secret military operation he just happened to be working for.”

“Too much of a coincidence” agrees Buffy.

“We don’t know he’s dead” argues Xander, “We just know he’s not showing up with this spell. Maybe he knows some magic, maybe he’s hidden himself from location spells somehow?”

“But why would he do that?” asks Willow, “I don’t think he thought anyone was after him. And anyway, he didn’t even know about demons until the Initiative came along.”

“Or so he says.”

Willow shakes her head. “For real. I saw his face.”

Xander persists, “Well, a guy who Frankensteins his own brother has to be into some dangerous stuff. Maybe it is a coincidence, and something else got him. Coincidences do happen.”

Giles says, “But there is no other obvious culprit. Uncomfortable as it may be, the Initiative do seem to be the ones who had contact with him and who ae capable of silencing him.”

“And you’d like it to be anything other than these soldiers” Anya tells Xander, “Because you like the whole army thing.”

“The whole army thing is the American military” Xander retorts, “I don’t know how demon armies work but the American military doesn’t kill humans.”

Buffy frowns. “Um, Xander…”

“Innocent humans” Xander amends. Looking around at their expressions, he adds, “Look, I’m not saying the army are perfect. But the point is, we’re trained to protect civilians, not kill them.”

“Not unless they’re a threat” says Anya, “And believe me, that definition can get really wide.”

Xander shakes his head. “I’m not talking about demon armies.”

“Nor am I.”

“But anyway” says Willow, “It’s not just the army funding the Initiative. There are a couple of tech corporations in on it and there could be others for all we know. No-one’s ever given me a complete breakdown of how it’s all paid for.”

Xander doesn’t look convinced. “But they’re still people” he says, “People who all teamed up to protect the world from demons, let’s not forget.”

“Is that the stated aim?” asks Giles, “We still don’t fully understand their motives.”

“That’s true” says Willow, “And we still don’t know about the top secret project Chris was working on.”

“But we don’t know it’s anything evil” says Xander, “All we’ve seen them do down there is capture demons and lock them away where they can’t hurt people.”

“And study them” Buffy points out.

“To find ways of killing them” Xander insists.

“Maybe” says Willow, “But a lot of the research is just figuring out how they work.”

Xander makes a _there you go_ gesture. “Which is useful in the finding ways to kill them.”

“Well, tangentially, maybe.”

“I could show them what to do with tangentially” mutters Buffy, “Here was me all hyped that I might get some professional back up.”

“Only if they found out about slayers” says Anya, “And I don’t recommend that.”

“Guys, you’re not being fair” says Xander, “So, we don’t know every last thing about why they’re fighting demons and you just assume they must be up to something bad? If that was true, they’d be helping demons! Why would they send me out to get hold of vampires before the vampires get hold of some innocent person if they didn’t want to protect people?”

“Power” says Anya simply, “There’s power in the demon world that plenty of humans in the know are just itching to get their hands on.”

“And if that means that humans get to use that power instead of demons” says Xander, “I can’t see a problem with that.”

“Maybe Chris could” says Giles. He has met the sort of people who covert the power of demons. They don’t tend to prioritise protecting people.

But Xander is shaking his head. “We don’t know what happened to Chris. Sure, it looks bad, but with humans aren’t we supposed to be innocent until proven guilty? And come on, Willow, can you really see Riley or Forest taking Chris out? And for what – if he told anyone about the Initiative, it’s not like anyone would believe him.”

“Then why did we have to sign confidentiality agreements?” asks Willow.

Xander has no answer to that. Giles hazards, “Perhaps the USA isn’t the only country engaged in demon research, or the US government the only entity with a interest. If Chris had gone public, the average member of the public would dismiss him but anyone already in the know could gain an insight the army wouldn’t want them to have.”

Xander begins, “So there’d be a procedure to…”

“Silence him?” suggests Giles. The American army is on of the few human institutions arguably more powerful than the Watchers’ Council, and Giles is well aware of the procedure they would employ in the circumstances.

But Xander shakes his head. “We don’t just kill people, even if they’re giving away government secrets.”

“Well let’s hope not” says Willow, “Because that’s what we’re doing.”

Anya nods cheerfully. “They could be coming for you next.”

Xander had looked uncomfortable at Willow’s words, but Anya’s rouse him to say, “It’s different with us. We’re trying to keep people safe.”

“And Chris is a person who’s very much not safe now” says Willow.

Xander says, “But we don’t know that’s because of the Initiative!”

“And we don’t know it’s not.” Willow and Xander stare at each other. Every so often, they have these wordless conversations that remind Giles just how long they have known each other.

Buffy breaks the silence with, “Whatever happened to Chris, I’m way from convinced the Initiative are the good guys.”  
Xander looks exasperated at this. “The Initiative are the American army, Buff.”

“Not just the army” Willow reminds him, “We don’t even know if they’re the biggest part of it, or just the most visible part.”

“And the army aren’t supposed to go after demons” says Buffy, “That’s my job. I was all happy to have some back up on the fighting evil front, but if that’s not what they’re doing –”

“It is” Xander insists, “And isn’t that a good thing?”

“– all I’m saying is they have the Slayer’s attention.” Buffy looks Xander carefully in the eyes. He looks mutinous, but looks away. Turning to Giles, Buffy asks, “Should these guys introduce me?”

“To the Initiative?” Giles blinks in surprise.

“Bad idea” mutters Anya.

Buffy explains, “If I make contact, I could be down there ready to protect Willow and Xander.”

“We’re not going to need protection, Buffy” Xander tells her. He looks soothed by the gesture, but tells her, “It’s one thing to talk about them with you guys, but I really can’t recruit someone I know is going to be a spy.”

“Not a spy” says Buffy, “Just back up. Anyway, if they wouldn’t harm a human, there’s no reason for me not to work with them, is there?”

“That’s if they see slayers as human” points out Anya.

Strange as it feels to agree with an ex-demon, Giles has to admit, “It could be that the Slayer power is something they’d take an unwanted interest in.”

Xander shakes his head at this. “They don’t need super strength the way Buffy does” he argues, “She’s out there on her own, they’re part of a team.”

“Would they like to be part of a superpowered team?” Anya asks.

“Regardless” says Giles, “I wouldn’t advise you to make contact with them in light of Chris’s disappearance.”

Buffy frowns. “See, that’s the light that’s making me think I need to protect my friends.”

“You can still do that. The Initiative not knowing about you could work to our advantage in an emergency.”

Xander sighs deeply and shakes his head again.

*****

Usually, a scooby meeting outside of an apocalypse means some chat and catching up once business has been seen to, but not today. Willow thinks Giles looks a bit downcast when they all make their excuses and leave, but it’s not like they had their usual consensus. And anyway, everyone is busy with college stuff and Initiative stuff. Well, except for Anya but she still trails after them as they walk back to campus. Buffy goes off to start work on her discussion group and Willow walks with Xander as far as the frat house, Anya still in tow.

She wants to talk to him about the whole secret agent thing and let him know that she gets how hard it is, how scary and confusing, and how she understands that he didn’t sign up for it when he joined the army, unlike her going in all ready to snoop. But she can’t, not this close to frat house, not with Anya beside them, out of uniform soldiers milling about and the Initiative facility literally under their feet. They walk in a silence that is only broken by Anya wanting to know why they aren’t talking. “Is it because Chris is dead?”

“He might not be dead” says Xander, and Willow says, “Anya, not here.” Then she looks at Xander because what does he think not showing up in a location spell means?

“I can check those location spells” Anya volunteers, “I’m good at basic spell work.”

“I remember” Willow mutters.

Xander heads inside to the elevator and his afternoon shift, and Anya follows Willow, who says, “I’m going to meet Oz now.”

“Sure. I can help you fill him in.”

“Anya, he’s my boyfriend.”

“Oh, I’m not trying to steal him. I saw enough of that in my vengeance days to see it’s just not worth the drama. Plus, I like a guy who talks more. Like Xander, for example.”

“Um. Good to know. And Oz wouldn’t be interested in anyone else.”

“Oh, you think that, but I saw it all the time back in the day, and every time, it was always a guy who absolutely wouldn’t cheat until he does.”

“Oz isn’t like that.” Willow thinks uncomfortably of the girl Buffy mentioned, the girl in the band. But even if Buffy was right to pick up on something (and did she, even? She didn’t say she had) Oz wouldn’t play along.

Beside her, Anya asks, “And you’ve got the wolf to think about.”

“What?”

“The wolf. Werewolves aren’t monogamous. Well, very occasionally if they’re in an established pack, but it’s rare.”

“Being a werewolf isn’t all Oz is. And Oz is Mr Monogamy. I’ve never even seen him look at another girl.”

“Oz might be actually as good as all the girls who ever summoned me thought their man was, but the wolf is a whole separate animal just sharing his body. Well, sort of. The metaphysics get complicated, but the cliff notes are you’re more or less dating two guys and only one of them is human.”

“The wolf doesn’t even exist twenty eight days of the month.”

“Oh, it exists, it’s just subdued.”

“You’re wrong.”

“I don’t think so. But if I am, there’s no harm in me coming along to meet him too, is there?”

“Yes there is. I know you’re new to the whole human thing, but you don’t crash someone’s date, and this is a date. Or sort of. Not really a three person thing.”

Anya slows, frowns ahead and asks, “Then how come he’s sitting at that table with another girl?”

Willow follows her gaze to the outside seating area where she and Oz agreed to meet. “I did say only sort of a date” she hears herself say, and trudges over. Anya follows and she can’t concentrate on putting her off with the pretty girl right there in conversation with Oz. They seem to have a lot to say to each other, and when she joins them, it turns out they’ve been sitting here saying it for a while.

Of course, the conversation peters out once she’s there. Oz tries to include her, even Anya tries to include her, but her being there makes things awkward in a way it really shouldn’t. Oz knows there was a scooby meeting she’s supposed to be telling him about, but he only briefly alludes to them having things they can catch up on later before he flees the awkward. Willow is left with Veruca and Anya, who eye each other warily. Anya says, “So…are you a werewolf or are you just really into band talk?”

“Anya!” yelps Willow, because Veruca must think she’s weird enough without having a friend who talks about werewolves. Except that Anya isn’t her friend. And nor is Veruca, so why should she care what she thinks?

Veruca’s already arched eyebrows hit her hairline and she coughs out a surprised laugh, but she replies, “Both, actually.” She sniffs in an animal way, a scenting the air way, and adds, “But you’re no wolf so how’d you know about it?”

“Oh, I used to be a demon.”

“And you lost it?”

“Not the way I’d put it but…” Anya shrugs awkwardly. It occurs to Willow that this is the first time she’s seen Anya look embarrassed. Veruca seems to know how to wrong foot everyone, even those with no shame.

Veruca shrugs back, an easy _I don’t care_ shrug. “That’s too bad.”

“It really is.”

“Well” Veruca stands up gracefully “I’ve been sat here long enough. Things to do. Good shirt, Willow.”

“Wait” Willow remembers, with a little jolt, that when it comes to werewolves, there’s more at stake than her feelings. “Are you all set for tonight? The wolf moon?”

“All set how? There’s not much planning to it.”

“I mean, do you have your cage set up?” And if not, will she have to share Oz’s? That sounds like a terrible idea but also the only obvious way to keep people safe at short notice.

And what if Veruca says –

Exactly what she does say: “A cage, are you kidding me?”

“What? But –”

“But nothing. Go lock yourself in a cage if you’re so worried about it.” Veruca walks off. Once she’s gone, Anya says, “You know, she has a point.”

“What? No she doesn’t!”

“Well, she wouldn’t be able to get you if you were locked up.”

“So you think everyone who isn’t a werewolf should just lock themselves up three nights a month?”

“You expect werewolves to do it.”

“Not all werewolves got the memo, apparently.”

“Well, there’s this whole self discovery movement going on in werewolf culture right now.”

“Werewolf culture? Werewolves have a culture?”

“Well, obviously.”

“I need to talk to Oz.”

“About werewolf culture?”

“About Veruca. Buffy too.” And the Initiative, technically. But how would that work? What could she even say, a werewolf just fessed up to me that she is indeed a werewolf because they exist and she’s not making herself safe three nights a month so you need to…what? What would they do? “I have to talk to Buffy.”

*****

“I don’t like this.” Willow senses Buffy and Oz’s eyes on her and adds, “What if she doesn’t show?” Except that part of her hopes Veruca won’t show. At least that would mean she isn’t interested enough in Oz to show up just because he called her.

Also, since when does Oz have Veruca’s number?

She would ask, but Buffy is right here with a tranquiliser gun. It sort of infringes on any coupley conversation. Probably also not a great idea to start one of those when Oz is busy locking himself in a cage. He sometimes gets a bit snappish (not literally, that comes later) right before darkness falls on a wolf night. Willow always put that down to stress, and – when it isn’t the first wolf night in a run – to tiredness – but now she wonders, is the wolf in there, waiting, getting antsy? She had always assumed the wolf is brought into being when the moon activates the curse, but Anya’s got her second guessing that. She should have researched it before now but it never seemed to matter much before. Oz caged himself so why worry?

Turns out, Veruca is why.

Buffy is talking to her. Willow makes an effort to concentrate. “Don’t worry, Willow. I’ll have a clear shot as soon as she’s through the door.”

“Right. Good.”

Her unease must show on her face for all she’s trying not to let it, because Oz adds, “I wish we had another way, but it’s short notice.”

“I know. At least this way she can’t hurt anyone.”

“At least tonight” says Buffy grimly, and Willow can see her point, because what about after?

*****

In the end, she doesn’t get to stay and see if Veruca shows up or if Buffy has to go and track her, because she has to get to the Initiative facility for her evening shift. If Veruca is planning on showing, she is cutting it fine.

Willow can’t quite get it all out her mind to give her full attention to what Professor Walsh is saying. She wouldn’t mind so much if it was only Dr Angleman here because she doesn’t actually care all that much what he thinks of her. But Professor Walsh is world renowned, and Willow’s mentor. Willow wants to impress her, and resents Veruca for making even paying her her full attention difficult.

Spike being here doesn’t help either. None of the chipped vampires are completely conscious, but whenever Spike is with it enough to open his eyes, he is twisting against the gurney he’s strapped to, to stare groggily at her.

Beside her, Warren seems to be having no trouble focusing.

“So, before we activate the all the implants remotely” Professor Walsh is explaining, “We need to gauge the voltage of the shock they are to administer. We already have some data on the level of voltage these hostiles can withstand.”

Willow is glad she was on MRI scanner duty instead of doing whatever they needed to do to get that data.

She looks briefly at the page of information Dr Angleman passes her way about the experiments in question. Warren summarises, “So you trapped ’em and zapped ’em? Must have been a fun day.”

“An informative day at any rate” says Walsh, “But these experiments relied on external shocks. Because most of the subjects given the prototype implant didn’t survive the first few hours, we have limited data on how well they can withstand internal shocks.”

Suddenly, Willow finds she is having no difficulty concentrating.

“The shock has to be painful enough to stop them feeding” Dr Angleman adds, “But it can’t do more damage to the surrounding brain tissue than they can heal from within a few hours.”

“So we just need to do a bit of trial and error?” asks Warren.

Spike has drifted off, Willow notices, his head still at an awkward angle from studying her.

“Precisely” confirms Walsh, “But only on one hostile. Get the voltage too high and there is every chance the implant, the hostile or both will be unusable. Or may need to carry out an expensive repair. I don’t want to have to do that to more than one implant.” She shows them a set of little handheld remote controls and demonstrates how they are to be used. “Once you’ve found a workable voltage, we can programme it into the other implants remotely, turn them on and then they’ll work automatically, whenever the hostiles try to feed.” She looks at them both, her gaze lingering on Willow, perhaps because she must look as sick as she feels. In an effort to seem professional, and in hope that the answer won’t be _how hard they scream_ , Willow asks, “How do we tell if the voltage is too high?”

“Initially, you’ll be relying on external observations” Walsh replies, “We’ll move on to electroencephalography once we have more of a framework.”

She shows them how they are to establish this framework, the voltage to start on, the increments to use. Warren is grinning widely. “Can we use any of them?” he asks.

Walsh nods. “So long as you only use one. That’s for now: Over time, we plan to expand the programme and at that point we can use more subjects for a fair test. But for now, we’re only after a framework.” She and Dr Angleman leave them to it. Willow wonders for a wild moment if they could fake the data and only say they did the experiment.

Not that Warren would agree to that. He’s practically bouncing.

It shouldn’t matter, she tells herself. Sure, it won’t be fun – she’d have to be Warren to find this fun – but they are vampires.

Spike tortured people with railroad spikes, she reminds herself. All she’s doing is stopping him from doing something like that again.

Right now, Spike is still out cold. She wishes he’d wake up and vamp out. It would make it easier.

Warren’s glee doesn’t help the greater good line of thinking. She can’t look at him and think he’s there with a view to end torture at the hands of vampires so much as lend a hand to torturing vampires. Because greater good or not, this is going to be agony for whichever one they choose.

Warren saunters over to the row of gurneys and for a moment Willow thinks he’s about to pick Spike, but then he lingers by the female. Of course it would be her. “Not her” Willow hears herself say. She’s not about to let Warren get off on this.

“Why not?”

“She’s smaller than the others. It might affect the results.”

Warren shrugs. “You’re thinking of human girls being all delicate. It doesn’t make any difference to these fuckers.” He kicks the brakes out from under the gurney.

Willow could protest some more but she’s thrown by the casual dig at human women because hello, she is one. Also, he does have a point about female vamps being as physically resilient as the males, at least according to the data she’s seen.

Plus, if she insists Warren chose a different vampire, she has a feeling he’d insist she take a more active role in the whole thing. And if one of them has to electrocute conscious creatures from inside their own brains and listen to the screaming, she’d rather it was Warren.

Not that she won’t hear the screaming.

And not that she’s too delicate to do the electrocuting, whatever Warren thinks. It’s just that she doesn’t have to when he’s falling over himself to volunteer.

It goes about how she feared it would. The vampire twitches as Warren tweaks a dial on the remote control. She isn’t really awake, but she’s awake enough to feel it.

Twitches progress to screaming, and that’s when the vampire starts to struggle against the straps around her torso and limbs. Warren laughs at that and mutters, “Yeah, good luck with that, bitch.”

Off to the side, one of the nameless male vampires starts groaning in a way that indicates he is properly awake. Willow sets her clipboard aside and injects him with the painkiller they’ve been told to use when this happens. His eyes glaze over gratefully. Its.

Its gurney is next to Spike’s, and he comes round briefly, locks eyes with her. She looks away automatically and then thinks, why shouldn’t she meet his eyes? It’s not like she has anything to be ashamed about. They are trying to stop vampires from murdering people. Or at least, she is. Warren is just having fun in a way Spike could probably relate to.

So why not put a chip in Warren’s brain? Is that where this is going?

And would it really be all that bad an idea?

“Red?”

Willow doesn’t know what will happen if anyone here finds out she and Spike have any sort of history. Not that it’s likely to be avoidable forever, but she can at least put it off right now by ignoring him, returning to her clipboard, and taking careful notes while the female vampire howls.

After a while, the struggles stop, and later still, so does the screaming. After that, the convulsions start. “That’s enough now” says Willow. Warren shoots her a poisonous look but she matches it and adds, “You don’t want her to dust.”

Warren shrugs and puts the remote control down. “You want to try that some time” he tells her, “Might lighten you up a bit.”

“She’s light” slurs Spike from his gurney, “But no having. Not any kind.”

*****

Once far from relaxing night shift gives way to a day of pretending to be a college student who didn’t watch someone electrocute a vampire all night, Willow heads back to her dorm room. Buffy is there, which, on one hand, good because they have a lot to talk about, but a part of Willow just wants to sleep.

Another part worries about what she’d dream. 

“You okay?” asks Buffy.

Willow realises she’s still standing in the doorway. “Um. Yeah. Walk?”

Buffy rolls her eyes but agrees.

Outside, the sunlight feels lancing after hours of fluorescent bulbs. Buffy says, “Don’t worry about Veruca. She showed, I tranqed.”

“What? Oh, her.”

“Okay, so I’m guessing it was an intense shift?”

Willow tells her. Buffy’s eyes widen. “Jeepers. I’m way guilty of sometimes making vamps last longer than I need to when I’m in a bad mood, but I don’t think I’d spend a whole night zapping them. Maybe Spike.” But then her face clouds and she says, “No, actually. Not even him.”

“That’s what I thought.” Willow has seen Buffy in a bad mood, stressed about an essay or Angel or the weight of her destiny, toying with a vampire the way a cat toys with a mouse, but what happened in the facility last night was different. Less like a cat, a natural predator, doing its thing and more like…well, more like scientists experimenting on mice. Which they do. And there are a lot of medications that wouldn’t exist otherwise.

But Initiative aren’t making medications and what they’re doing instead isn’t entirely clear. “It feels all wrong. I mean, sure, we’re stopping them from killing people but what else are we doing? Apart from loving every minute of it in Warren’s case.” She sighs. “Maybe Warren’s just better than me at…” Torture? “It’s starting to feel ooky down there.”

Buffy is frowning. “I don’t like the idea of you down there alone.”

“I’ve got Xander.” And magic, if it comes to it.

“Much as Xander’s had the soldier upgrade, I still don’t like the idea of you being down there. Either of you.” Buffy stops walking and tells her, “I want to find a way in. A sneaky way, like an evacuation route or something, so I can get down there in an emergency.”

Willow nods. “Sure. I’ll find you one.” As they resume walking, she adds, “Oh, but Buffy? Let’s not tell Xander. I think he’s struggling with the whole serve his country and also gossip about it with the scoobies thing.”

Buffy pouts. “We are his country. People in his country at least.”

“I know. And the government? Not the only organisation sending money the Initiative’s way. Maybe I can find out more about that as well as finding you a way in and worrying about cruelty to Spike.” When she says it out loud in the sunshine, it doesn’t seem so bad. After all, why should she worry about Spike? Spike was all ready to kill her that night he came to the school.

Buffy smiles. “That sounds like a plan. But pending proof of evil corporations, I won’t say a word to Xander.”

“Thank you. Oh, and thank you for dealing with Veruca.”

Buffy’s smile fades. “I haven’t, really. I mean, I tranqed her, and once Oz de-wolfed this morning, we put her in the cage before she woke up.”

Willow stops walking. “She’s in Oz’s cage?” It crosses her mind that the cage is the one place she doesn’t get to be with him. A stupid thought. Where else was Buffy meant to put her?

“I’m sorry, Willow, but where else was I supposed to put her?”

“It’s okay, I got there.”

Buffy sighs. “But what now? We can’t leave her locked up indefinitely. I vote it’s okay to leave her locked up this run of wolf moons but what about after that?”

Willow isn’t really happy with the idea of Veruca locked in Oz’s cage just two more nights but she gets it. “I guess we talk to her. Convince her to make herself safe from now on.”

Buffy shakes her head. “I tried that. That’s what I’ve been doing all morning.”

“Oz too?” Willow realises.

“If it’s any consolation, she didn’t listen to him either.”

“That kind of is.”

“If she ends up a wolf on the loose and I have to kill her to keep her from hurting someone, then I will. I’m not leaping for joy at the prospect here, but I can do it. But if I let her out knowing she’ll wind up a wolf on the loose and I’ll have to kill her, that’s a whole level of premeditated I don’t want to get into.” Buffy looks at Willow. “I guess the Initiative are too busy electrocuting vampires to help?”

“They’re too busy being what I wouldn’t even wish on Veruca to help, not when she’s human most of the time.” Not when she is as human as Oz and no more. If Willow were to turn her in, what sort of precedent would she be setting? “Have you spoken to Giles about this?”

Buffy looks a little surprised. “No. I probably should.”

“Probably. Hey, I’m going to go find Oz. I’ll see you later, okay?”

“Sure. Bye, Willow.”

Oz isn’t in his room. Devon says he hasn’t been there all night and he says it reluctantly, like he assumed Oz was with Willow and is now wondering who he is with instead.

Veruca is who. Not in the way Devon thinks, of course. They are cross-legged on the floor of the crypt, separated by the bars of the cage and deep in discussion when Willow enters. Oz hastily gets up and steers her outside while Veruca smirks. A part of Willow that has never really governed her wonders if it is too late to change her mind about the whole handing her over to the Initiative thing but even that part doesn’t really mean it.

“What’s going on?” asks Willow, as soon as they are outside.

Oz gestures back into the interior of the crypt. “I’m trying to get her to cage herself voluntarily. Not going well so far.”

“Maybe give her some thinking time?”

Oz shakes his head. “There’s only so long to reason with her before the wolf takes over.”

Or is the wolf already in control? If Anya is to be believed, it might be.

Oz adds, “I don’t know what will happen to her if she doesn’t make the right choice here. Nor does Buffy, which is worrying.”  
“Right. But why would she listen to you?”

“She feels…connected to me, I guess. Because of the wolf.” Oz frowns a little.

“How was the wolf? Last night, with her there?”

Oz shakes his head a little, like remembering is tough in more ways than just wolf nights mostly being forgotten straight off. “I think it just paced.”

Not much to do in a cage, Willow supposes, beside pace. She thinks of the demons in the holding cells retracing their bored steps. Maybe she should get the wolf a tyre to chew.

Oz adds, “But it wanted out. It always does.”

“Anya says…well, I guess we don’t need to worry about what Anya says.”

“No, I think we do.” Met with a questioning look, Oz points out, “She’s a thousand years old. She knows stuff.”

“Okay. Well, she said the wolf is a separate animal, and it isn’t monogamous.”

“Oh.” Oz deflates a little. “Kind of a relief.”

“What is?”

“It’s just that there’s a…” He touches his chest, seems to catch himself, adjust his t-shirt. “Kind of a pull.”

Willow feels like she’s sinking. “To Veruca.”

He nods. “But it’s not me, is it? It’s the wolf. I’m not interested in anyone but you.” He frowns. “But the wolf…I thought it just disappeared between full moons. Maybe I just hoped it disappeared between full moons.”

“But if it doesn’t, we’ll figure it out together, right?”

Oz doesn’t look as convinced as she’d like.

*****

“Giles?” Buffy enters without knocking. Giles hastily turns the TV off and wishes she’d caught him at something more productive. “Buffy, hello. Has something happened?”

She sits down. “Werewolves happened.”

He listens as she explains the situation. It is complicated to say the least.

Ethically, that is. The practicalities of tranquiliser gun and cage are already taken care of. “So you want to know what to do with her should she refuse to cage herself going forward?”

“Exactly” says Buffy.

“Our options are limited, you realise.”

“See, I hoped you’d have some sparkly new option I hadn’t thought of!”

“Sorry to disappoint.” Giles thinks for a moment and asks, “Is there any way she could be handed to the Initiative?”

Buffy shakes her head. “She’s too human. And it’s Willow saying that. She was majorly wigged after her shift last night. It sounds like this sleaze bag she has to work with was enjoying the electrocuty implants a little too much.”

“Well, if you let her go, we both know what a werewolf could do to a person.” Giles considers. “It is possible that this Veruca has already attacked someone, of course. Perhaps the blasé attitude to human life is a self defence mechanism.”

Buffy winces. “In other words she’s Faith two point oh?”

“She could be.”

“Great. Because that’s what I was missing from my life. A Faith patch.”

“I imagine if she accidently caused a death, blaming the wolf would be a way to sidestep guilt.”

“And caging the wolf shows she could control it and puts all the guilt back on her.”

“Precisely.”

“So how do we get through to her?” muses Buffy. She considers a while before asking, “Do you think the watchers would take her and do the rehab they were going to do to Faith? At least then you could keep an eye on her.”

“I think you’re vastly overestimating what how much they let me see. Besides, they have no use for a werewolf.” They already have one, he doesn’t tell her. He has never seen it – them – but he has heard the rumours. “I don’t think that’s an option.”

“So our choices are keep her in Oz’s cage or let her go and I have to kill her when she wolfs out?”

“I’m afraid so.” Seeing Buffy deflate from resigned to upset, Giles adds, “I could do it, if you prefer.”

“I can’t ask you to do that, Giles.”

“You didn’t ask – I offered.”

“But I’m the Slayer.”

And I’ve killed a human before, he doesn’t say. What he does say is, “Since you have her in the cage, it’s a somewhat moot point. We can’t risk letting her go unless she is prepared to avoid harming people.”

Buffy considers this. “Maybe we need to find out if she is pulling a Faith.”

“Find out whether she harmed someone before, you mean?”

“Exactly. I could do some digging, find out where she lived before she rocked up at UC Sunnydale, and then we could find out about werewolf attacks in that area.”

“And confront her with what we discover.” Giles nods. It is a stretch to suppose Veruca is ready for that confrontation, but it is a better plan than death or indefinite imprisonment.

“I guess I need to get back to campus then” says Buffy, standing up, “Her files will be on the computer system there.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“Thanks, but I think I need Willow for this one.”

*****

“I don’t know how to show him it’s okay!” Willow concludes.

Tara offers a sympathetic tilt of her head. She is a good listener, and a good spotter of worries. No sooner had Willow got through the door of her room than Tara had decided she was in no way in the right frame of mind for magic. Now, they are seated on the scatter cushions that litter the thick carpet, hands curled around steaming mugs of some sweet herbal tea Willow can’t quite identify.

Everything about Tara’s room is soft and sweet scented. Willow’s worries bubbled to the surface to be expelled as soon as Tara asked her what was wrong. She adds, “I don’t care if the wolf is around all the time. I really don’t. But I think he does.”

“I-it’s hard, having something primal be a part of you.”

Willow gives what she hopes is a sympathetic look. “At least yours doesn’t take over every full moon.”

“No, th-thank Hecate.”

Willow has never spoken with Tara about Hecate. They must just have a god, like so many other things, in common. “Do you ever sense your demon side?”

Tara shakes her head. “No. B-but it’s not the same as being a werewolf. A-at least Oz gets to be a separate entity to the wolf. My demon s-side is woven in. P-part of me.”

Willow fights an impulse to take her hand and succeeds. That is one way magic can further an intimacy maybe more than the casters were planning: So many spells require hand holding. “And there’s nothing evil about you” she says, “You don’t let the primal win, so Oz won’t either.”

Talking to Tara makes it all seem better. Tara’s room feels like some secret place where nothing bad happens. Hard to believe anywhere in Sunnydale could feel so safe, so Willow stays. They talk all night. Not just about Oz, about everything. Magic and books and lots more besides. Willow talks about her bat mitzvah, about how she met Xander and about Jesse. Tara talks about her mom, about how she applied for college without telling her father and about how a crush on a teacher made her realise she is gay. “N-not that I got it right away” she says, finger tracing the embroidery on the blanket she’s pulled over them both as the night’s cold seeped in “I-I didn’t know it was, um, a thing. I-I know it sounds weird, but I’d never actually heard of gay.”

“That’s not weird. I mean, no-one talks about it with children, do they?”

“D-definitely not where I come from. I mean, there was a s-sermon once, but I didn’t actually make the connection.”

“Hard to do that when there’s nothing to connect it to.” It must have been lonely, Willow realises. “So you only realised it’s possible when it happened to you?”

“Oh, n-no, I still didn’t realise then. I thought it w-was a sign the demon was waking up.”

“You thought being gay was demonic?”

Tara flashes a self-conscious smile. “Well, th-that was the jist of the sermon, anyway.”

“So how did you learn it’s not just you?” Willow really hopes someone kind was on hand to speak to her about it.

“I w-went to the library.”

No kind person then. Except, books can be kinder than some people. “At least you know now.”

“It t-took me long enough.” Tara’s smile grows. “I’d even had crushes on boys before that. But I guess I just l-liked them as people.”

Willow thinks uneasily of Xander and Giles. “I get that. I think that’s why I had this brief thing with Xander. I don’t think I really saw him that way but it felt exciting to think I could, you know? Because I’d thought so long that if I could feel like that about anyone, it would be him.” But did kissing Xander really feel that different to kissing Oz?

Oz will be prowling his cage by now, with Veruca. Connected in a way she and Oz won’t ever be.

But she can live with that. It’s not like the wolf is Oz. And it’s not like she can’t be primal herself, in the sense of the wild abandon that comes with magic. It’s just that she enjoys that with someone else.

She thinks of Buffy, and the flutter she gets now and then when they hold hands in the Bronze. She thinks about telling Tara about that but can’t quite. That’s something she can’t share with someone else, not even Tara. Or at least, not yet.

When morning comes, they pick themselves off the cushions and stretch. Willow takes a shower in Tara’s little cubicle while Tara fetches them a breakfast of coffee and cinnamon rolls.

They hug before they go their separate ways, Tara to a lecture and Willow to check on Oz. She actually feels light hearted as she makes her way to the cemetery, like conversation with Tara has smoothed away the sharp edges of her worry.

Those edges come back biting when she walks into the crypt to find Oz and Veruca curled up naked together. Oz wakes and scrambles up. Willow finds she is breathing too hard and tries to calm herself down, because she knew they’d both be transforming in there, didn’t she? Transforming and all the accompanying nudity. It doesn’t mean…

“Willow”

She meets Oz’s gaze, and hopes he is about to say _nothing happened_ or something like that. But what he says is, “I’m sorry.”

She closes her eyes.

From somewhere that indicates she has stood up and slouched off to the other side of the cage, Veruca says, “I can’t say I am.”  
Willow opens her eyes to see Oz scowl at Veruca. He takes a step closer to the door, a step closer to Willow. Stalls when Veruca does the same. When he looks at her, she exclaims, “Oh come on! You can’t keep me here forever against my will!”

Willow bites out, “Try us!”

Veruca looks her way, takes in the tears and smirks.

“Willow –” Oz begins, reaching for the door. But Willow can’t stand being in here with her so she staggers backwards and then turns and flees. Emerges in sunlight to frantically wipe away her tears because it’s not like Oz could help it. It’s not like he cheated. The wolf did.

She should have found some way to imprison Veruca with magic. Some binding spell or barrier spell or something. Why didn’t she think of that? Has she really been too busy watching stupid Warren tormenting stupid vampires in the stupid Initiative lab? Too busy to stop poor Oz having to share his cage with that skank.

She is too busy wiping tears and thinking angry thoughts to really register the sounds of a struggle in the crypt until it is too late, and Veruca is shoving past her, hard enough to make her fall, and running through the cemetery. 

Willow pushes herself up. He palms are grazed.

“Willow!” Oz is beside her. His face is cut.

“Oz, you’re hurt.”

“I’m okay.”

“I shouldn’t have run out.” If she’d stayed, they could have let Oz out the cage without freeing Veruca between the two of them. Another thing that’s her fault.

Oz is shaking his head. “Willow, I’m so sorry. It just – we were in wolf form and it just –”

“It was the wolf. I know.” But knowing it and feeling it are different. “You should get some…well, not sleep, because head injury.”

“More a face injury. I’m alright.”

“Good. But. I need. I need to go.” Willow stumbles away, her hands bleeding and her face wet.

*****

“I should have done things differently” she tells Buffy later, “I should have used a spell to keep her caged.”

“You can’t blame yourself, Will.”

They are sitting on Willow’s bed in their dorm room. Willow registers distantly that they shouldn’t be talking about any of this where the Initiative might hear. But really, is she so important that they’ll be spying on her?

Anyway, the supernatural part of the whole thing doesn’t matter so much as, “I don’t want to lose him, Buffy. But it hurts. I know it wasn’t him but…”

“But it’s more complicated than it not being him at all” Buffy finishes, and Willow thinks, right, Angelus. At least the wolf isn’t as complicated as that mess.

Buffy wraps an arm around her. “You can talk to him” she says, “There’ll be plenty of time for that. And until you’re ready, I’ll be here with ice cream and moral support. I just need to see to one thing first.”

Willow nods. “Veruca.”

“That’d be the thing.”

“What will you do?” Willow thinks she wouldn’t honestly care if the answer was _kill her_ , but she still feels a shiver of relief when Buffy says, “Talk to her. At least I’ll try to.”

The relief, Willow realises, is for Buffy. But Buffy won’t be spared killing Veruca because, “I’m not sure talking will cut it. Oz already tried, when he wasn’t busy…” and her voice cracks.

Buffy gives her a consoling squeeze. “I’ve been looking into her background. I’ve found something I can use.” She frowns. “Hey, where were you last night? I was going to ask you to help with hacking the computer system.”

“I was at Tara’s.”

“I should have thought of that. But Anya was hanging around campus like a lost ex vengeance demon and it turns out she knows a lot about computers for a one-thousand-year-old.”

Willow wipes her eyes. “What did you find?”

Buffy tenses against her. “Veruca’s from Maryland originally. I checked out wolf attacks in that area, and it looks like she killed someone she went to school with. Amy Forrester. They were in the same class elementary through to high school.”

Willow thinks of Xander and feels a shiver of sympathy. “Oh.”

“Yeah. For the year after that happened, the college records just say she was on a gap year, but nothing about what she got up to.” 

Trying not to implode, is what she got up to, Willow realises. And not particularly successfully. “So you think if you can’t get her to face up to that…”

“Maybe then we can talk cages” Buffy confirms. “But I’m not sure it will work. She might not be ready and even if she is, some random person I-know-what-you-did-last-summering her about it might just make her shut down.”

“You should tell her you’re the slayer. She might respect that. She seemed interested in Anya for about a half second when she found out about the demon thing.” Willow frowns. “Um. Not that a Slayer is a demon or anything, it’s just..”

“It might be a way in” Buffy finishes for her. “Thanks.”

Willow nods and doesn’t ask what plan B is because she knows. She stands up. “I need to go. I’ve got a shift in the lab.”

Buffy stands up too. “Are you sure you’re up for it? It doesn’t seem like the place to be if you’re distracted.”

“I’ll manage.” Really, Willow knows she is running on coffee and shock. The pain isn’t here yet. “It’s a double shift so I won’t be able to help with the Veruca tracking, I’m afraid. But that’s probably a good thing.”

“Sure. And if I can’t find her, I’ll feel better knowing you’re somewhere she’s definitely not.”

“How do you plan to track her?” Willow registers Buffy’s expression and knows the answer. “Oh.”

“I’m sorry, Will. But Oz can scent her.”

Willow makes herself nod because the alternative is Veruca possibly killing someone else. Then she realises, “Oh – and Tara can do a location spell. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.”

“Sure. I’ll call in on her. Be safe, Will.” Buffy gives her a Slayer-strength hug and departs.

*****

“Do we really need to do this?” Willow asks when she’s presented with the vampire girl and the remote control, “I mean, we took the voltage up as high as we could already.”

Professor Walsh raises an eyebrow. “I wouldn’t have thought I needed to explain to you the importance of repeating an experiment.”

Willow takes the remote control. “No. You don’t.” At least Warren isn’t here to relish the whole thing this time. But then, if he was, he could do the actual shocking. Actually, “How come Warren isn’t here?”

Walsh has taken up a clipboard and barely glances up from it. “He’s working on the other project.”

Right, the even more secret project. Willow wonders what the experiments for that one are like. Probably pretty brutal, if it’s even more secret, or maybe that doesn’t make sense. 

Professor Walsh says, “Ready when you are, Ms Rosenberg.”

Right. The electrocuting. For some reason, Willow looks at Spike, like he’ll talk her through it. He’s out of it though, open-eyed but focusing on nothing. The other two males are asleep. Trust Spike to be the one almost-kind-of awake. Willow wonders if that means he’s stronger than the other two or if it’s just her bad luck.

Probably her bad luck. Especially as the vampire girl is also as close to awake as the chipped vampires get right now, her eyes open and searching like she’s trying to predict where the pain will come from.

“Ms Rosenberg?”

Willow turns the dial. Just a little, just to the lowest available voltage. The vampire shifts and whimpers. Professor Walsh takes notes.

The next three shocks only produce more shifting, more whimpering. A flinch. It’s the fourth that has her screaming. Somehow it sounds louder when Willow is the one giving the shocks.

Willow pauses. It doesn’t feel like she pauses for long, but apparently it is long enough for Professor Walsh to say, “We can swap if you’d prefer.”

Willow looks at her gratefully. But then she wonders if Walsh is testing her. What if she agrees to swap controls for clipboard and Walsh thinks she isn’t cut out for the other classified project?

And she is cut out for it, whatever Warren thinks. Whatever Veruca thinks, come to that. Veruca with her smirk and her smug assumption that Willow doesn’t matter at all, that the best that can be said about her is she wears a good shirt. Willow turns the dial again. The vampire howls.

Spike is more alert now, lifting his head, face blank. Willow thinks about how he was all ready to kill Buffy once upon a time and turns the dial a sixth time. Thinks about Jesse. A seventh. Thinks about Angelus’ big hands at her throat. About Miss Calendar’s funeral. Eight, nine.

Thinks about Oz.

Then, after a while, she doesn’t need to think at all to just keep going. Professor Walsh watches the whole time.

When she has worked her way through the voltages, Willow realises her hands are shaking. She sets the controls aside and clenches them at her sides.

“Well done” says Walsh. She gives Willow a rare half smile.

Spike slurs, “Didn’t know…y’had it in you, pet.”

Walsh raises a questioning eyebrow and Willow says, “I think he thinks I’m someone else.”

“Think you are” agrees Spike.

“Sometimes they try to get under your skin” says Walsh, “I’m sure you won’t let that be a problem.” She moves closer to the gurney the vampire girl is strapped to. Reluctantly, Willow does the same.

The vampire did pant through the pain at one point, but now she’s not breathing. There is a little blood beside her head and Willow realises she is bleeding from the ear. Walsh regards her with professional interest and says, “Perhaps we should give it some rest time before the next trial.”

“Another one?”

“Of course. We need a clear idea of how much strain they can function under.” She smiles at Willow. “But Dr Angleman can help me with that. I think you’re shift has just about ended.”

“Right.” Willow tries and fails to not sound relieved.

Once she’s out the lab she walks in a daze to the elevators. A whole night must have passed above. She didn’t see the darkness but she felt it. 

“Will?” Xander is in front of her. Willow hadn’t realised how badly she needed to see him until she starts to sob.

*****

When they reach the dorm room Xander knocks then opens the door without waiting for an answer, wrapping an arm around Willow and steering her in. “Hey, Buff, one Willow delivery and – oh, sorry, I didn’t realise you had company.”

The company is Tara. She is perched on Willow’s bed while Buffy is seated on her own. The both look tired and dishevelled, but both are more worried about her when they see the tear tracks.

The way that happens sometimes when someone kind shows up at an emotionally charged moment, Willow starts crying afresh. She feels briefly embarrassed but then she realises, she and Tara saw each other’s’ deepest fears back in the haunted house and they’ll hopefully cast intense spells together. They are past embarrassment.

As for Buffy, she’s seen the full Willow range. She gets up and hurries over, and Willow realises Tara is already there. Tara reached her before Buffy. Huh.

Buffy asks, “What happened?”

Xander begins to say, “I ran into her down in, um” and then he stops and looks at Tara.

Right, thinks Willow, civilian. There’s no way she’s going to lift the lid on all the evil under their feet and show it to Tara. They couldn’t pay her to.

How is she going to hide it when they do magic together?

“Right” Buffy is saying, “That…study group.”

“That really sad study group” agrees Xander.

Tara says, “I-it wasn’t a study group, was it?”

Willow shakes her head. “No, but it doesn’t matter. It’s just a stupid thing.”

“N-not stupid if it upset you this much.”

Willow glances from her to Buffy. “What about you guys? Did something happen? Is Oz okay?”

Xander asks, “Something happened to Oz?” and Willow thinks right, he doesn’t know. All of this happened so quickly. She tries to explain, “There’s this…werewolf girl” and then she stops.

Buffy looks grim. “Actually, no, there isn’t any more.”

“What?”

Buffy gestures to Tara. “I called in on Tara to try the location spell and it showed Veruca going out into the woods. But I guessed she’d be moving around out there so I went to get Oz.”

“Oz who is fine now?” Willow asks urgently.

Buffy nods, squeezes her hand. “Oz who is fine now. He tracked Veruca but all we found was a pile of clothes. Oh, and an army guy who totally got in my way.” Buffy throws a half-serious scowl Xander’s way. He raises his hands in an _our bad_ sort of gesture but asks, “Clothes?”

Tara explains, “The l-location spell showed her heading for the woods, but she must have got there and left the clothes to c-confuse Oz.”

Willow asks, “So where did she go then?”

“Straight to Tara” says Buffy, “But we think she was after you. Oz said it’s just that you and her kind of, um, smell alike, what with hanging out together and all.” Buffy frowns a little at that.

Xander puts in, “So, when you say this wolf who was gunning for Willow isn’t here anymore, please tell me this story involves a silver bullet.”

Buffy shakes her head. “Oz was almost transformed by the time we got to her. We just had time to meet Veruca forcing her way into Tara’s dorm room, establish that she had the wrong girl and then they both transformed and” Buffy claps once, hard.

Tara elaborates, “That’s the s-sound of two werewolves colliding mid-air in my d-dorm room.”

Internally, Willow thanks Hecate Tara is safe. She reaches out and grasps Tara’s hand briefly, and asks Buffy, “So, Veruca didn’t survive the giant clap?”

Buffy shakes her head. “We’ve just got back from…well.” She and Tara exchange a guilty look. Tara explains, “W-we b-buried her in the wood. I u-used a glamour so no-one could s-see what we were carrying. I’ve n-never used magic for…”

“Oh, Tara.” Willow finds herself giving her fellow witch a hug. She’s only known her a few weeks and already she’s dragged her into darkness. “What else were you supposed to do? You couldn’t leave her in your dorm room. Which she chose to come to by the way.”

Buffy adds, “She was planning to kill Willow. She would have settled for killing you.”

“No great loss to the world” says Xander and Willow wonders for a moment if he’d be so causal about an almost human death just a year ago.

Of course he wouldn’t. But what can she expect with everything they see? And, “At least you’re all safe. Where is Oz?” Because safe or not, he has to be hurting after taking a life.

“He’s back at his house” Buffy tells her, “You should go to him.”

*****

She goes to him. She finds him packing.

“I don’t care if the wolf is a part of you all the time” she tells him, after he explains, “I already got that memo from Anya.”

He nods. She wishes he would just speak for once without every word being measured. But when he does speak, he says, “You might not care, but I do. I can’t risk you.”

“We’ve been dating years and I’m fine!”

When he hugs her, she wants to push him away, but she also wants to burrow into the embrace and never let him go. She wants both at exactly the same time. Into his shoulder, she says, “I need you, Oz.”

Oz whispers back, “Then I’d better work out how to live with the wolf, and come back as soon as I can.” He pulls away and looks at her steadily, “And in the meantime, things might change. I get that now.”

“What things? I’ll wait for you. I’ll be waiting.”

For the first time, he can’t seem to quite meet her eye. “I hadn’t realised how close you and Tara were getting until I smelt you on her today.”

“We only talked. We talked all last night. But we didn’t do anything.”

“I know. It’s not that sort of smell. But I’m just saying, if you end up figuring some things out here while I’m figuring things out somewhere else, I get it. I mean, I’m not rooting for it because all my rooting is for you and me, but I love you and part of that means not wanting to hold onto you if you want to let go.”

“But I don’t. I love you too. I need you here, Oz.”

He presses a chaste kiss to her lips. “I’ll come back here. As soon as I’m safe. And then we can talk more.” And then he picks up a suitcase, heads outside and gets into his van. And then he leaves.


End file.
